A Lone Boat Beneath the Lonely Mountain's Shadow — Print & Oil Painting

The paint here has been dragged rather than laid. Almost every passage is built from broad rectangular strokes pulled sideways with a hard edge, as though a blade had been drawn across a loaded surface, and the underlayer shows through in ragged breaks wherever the pressure lifted. Cloud, rock and water are all handled the same way.

The peak stands centre, a steep asymmetric horn in rust, umber and cold steel, its snow packed into the gullies as clean white wedges rather than as a covering. It is more weathered and less regular than the other versions of this mountain, with a secondary shoulder falling away to the left and a broken crest.

Most of the actual painting is in the foothills. A wide band of ochre and burnt sienna fills the lower middle of the canvas, patched with snow, scored with dark ravines and dotted with what may be scrub or may be ruins, deliberately left unresolved. Above it the sky is a heavy teal worked with the same scraping tool.

The scale only arrives in the last centimetre. Along the very bottom edge runs a strip of pale water, and on it sits one small dark oval with a single upright mark standing in it. Everything above is measured from that one boat, and the reading changes completely once it has been noticed.

Anyone coming to this mountain from the south comes by water first, which makes a single hull on flat water the right way to open the approach. From our Lord of the Rings collection, alongside the peak with a whole lake laid beneath it and the town that boat would have set out from.