The Witch-king's Fellbeast Baring Its Teeth in the Mist — Print & Oil Painting

This is a photographic frame rather than a painted one, and it is worth saying so, because the light behaves in a way no painter would have chosen. The sky is blown out, the shadows in the ruins go flat and grey, and the whole panorama sits at the low contrast of an overcast afternoon. It is a record of a place rather than a design.

The frame is a long letterbox and the composition uses every centimetre of it. The left quarter is taken by the creature, the middle by a broken city, and the right by a wall of snow mountains, so the eye travels across the picture in three distinct stages rather than being drawn to any single point.

The animal has landed rather than attacked. It is perched on the stump of a ruined tower with the wings held half open and folded forward, the near one hanging in a heavy dark curtain, and the long tail dropping straight down the face of the tower and curling in a loop across the rooftops below. The rider is a small upright silhouette at the base of the neck. Nothing about the pose is mid-strike.

The city underneath does most of the storytelling. Domes are open to the sky, arcades stand with the roofs gone, whole facades survive with nothing behind them, and the streets between are choked with fallen stone. Away at the centre a single pale spire is still upright, and beyond the last of the walls the ground runs out into an empty ochre plain.

The mist the title promises is not really here. What the haze does instead is separate the three planes cleanly, so that the ruin sits in front of the plain and the plain in front of the mountains, and the creature reads as very close and very solid against all of it. From our Lord of the Rings collection, next to another of Gondor's ruined streets, standing empty and the walls that had not fallen yet.