Sauron's Eye Ablaze in Fire and Smoke — Print & Oil Painting

There is no dark anywhere in this picture, which for this subject is a genuinely odd decision and the reason the image works. The entire surface, corner to corner, is fire: scarlet, orange, cadmium and a pale yellow, laid in as churning cloud with no cool note and no black to push against. Saturation is close to the maximum the medium will hold.

Out of that, a disc. The iris is a broad circular corona of flame radiating outward from the centre in hundreds of fine feathered spikes, darker at its rim where the fire folds over on itself, brighter as it approaches the middle. It has been given no outline at all; it is a change of density rather than a shape.

The pupil is the only thing in the whole image with a hard edge. A narrow vertical slit, tapered to a point at both ends, sits dead centre, and it is the single dark mark on the canvas apart from a small white flare burning at its middle where the heat is greatest. Everything in the picture leads to a shape the width of a finger.

The smoke around it is worked wet into wet, so the cloud and the eye are made of the same substance and there is no point at which one stops and the other starts. The thing is not floating in the fire. It is a place where the fire has briefly agreed to be a shape.

That is the more faithful reading of the two available. The book gives this a rim of flame and a black slit and otherwise makes it a quality of the air, something felt as pressure and searching rather than seen as an object. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, next to the same eye set over a helm in the dark and the eye blazing on top of its own tower.