Samwise Gamgee, Frodo Baggins and Gollum at Gorgoroth — Print & Oil Painting

A single horizontal beam holds this picture together. It leaves a black tower in the middle distance and runs left across the canvas as a hard orange-gold line, passing over the plain at almost exactly the height of the two small figures walking beneath it. Everything else in the composition is broken and diagonal. That beam is the only straight line in the frame.

The colour is violet, and not as an accident of the hour. Rock, plain, cloud and shadow are all worked in purple, magenta and cold lilac, with the lit cracks in the ground picked out in the same orange as the beam. It is a landscape painted in the colour of a bruise.

Three watchers are arranged as a triangle. Two hooded figures stand near the lower left with their backs to us, one carrying a pack, both facing the tower. Away to the right, up on a rock and turned toward them, a hunched grey shape crouches on all fours. He is watching them, and we are watching him, and neither of the walkers knows about either of us.

The rest of the furniture is placed with care: a volcano behind the tower throwing up a column of lava and black smoke, a huge dead tree at the right edge whose bare limbs frame the whole scene, and broken standing rocks scattered across the middle ground like teeth.

The plain of Gorgoroth lies between that tower and that mountain, and crossing it is the last stretch of the road and by a distance the worst. From our Lord of the Rings collection, alongside the way the walking eventually ends.