Dawn Light Crowning the Lonely Mountain's Peak — Print & Oil Painting

This one is chasing photography and very nearly catches it. The rock is rendered with the kind of detail that only a camera usually bothers with: individual couloirs packed with snow, exposed faces where the wind has stripped them bare, the granular difference between old ice and fresh, and a cornice curling off the summit ridge.

The single moving element is a plume. Spindrift is being torn off the top of the peak and carried to the right in a long feathered banner, lit from behind so that it glows warm against the darker sky. Everything else in the frame is completely still, which makes that one streak the whole event of the picture.

Light has only reached the top. A narrow band of gold sits on the summit and the upper ridges; below a certain altitude the mountain is still in a cold blue night, and the transition between the two is placed about a third of the way down the peak. The clouds behind take the same warmth, running from apricot at the right to a bruised grey at the left.

Mist fills everything under the mountain, banked in soft layers that hide the base entirely, with two lower rock shoulders breaking through at the far left and far right and a flat pale surface at the very bottom that could be water or could be more cloud.

It is worth noticing what this painting refuses to do. A mountain famous for what is inside it has been painted purely as geology, with no gate, no ruins and no smoke, and the effect is to make the hollow interior feel like a rumour. From our Lord of the Rings collection, alongside the same horn under a streaked gold sky and the peak given still water to stand in.