Odin Bathed in a Golden Beam of Light — Print & Oil Painting

The crop is very tight and the picture is almost entirely black. A shaft of golden light falls from the top centre, widening as it comes and thick with drifting pale specks, and it lands on the brow of the helmet. Outside that shaft the artist has let the whole canvas go, so the frame edges carry no information at all.

The helmet fills the upper half. A broad polished band crosses the forehead and takes a hot white highlight along its top edge, and from the temples two large curved wings sweep up and back, dark bronze on their inner faces with gold running along every rim, cropped by the top corners of the frame.

The face beneath it is old and heavily worked. Deep grooves run from the nose to the corners of the mouth, the skin is weathered and warm, and a white moustache and long white beard occupy the lower third of the picture in fine directional strokes. His left side, on our right, shows one grey blue eye looking slightly away from us. The other side has no eye at all: a shaped gold plate is set into the helmet where it should be, catching the same light as the brow band.

Below the beard the composition closes with gold: two large shoulder discs, one at each bottom corner, and an angular collar between them. Orange leads the measurement with red second at moderate saturation and brightness, which is the beam and the metal accounting for nearly all the colour in the canvas.

The missing eye was a purchase. In the stories he gave it up deliberately in exchange for knowledge, dropping it into a well at the roots of the world tree, and what he got back was worth the trade to him. The eye itself did not stop working either: separated from him it kept everything he knew and went on thinking on its own account. Painting the empty side as polished gold rather than as an injury is closer to how he treats it. From our Marvel collection, beside the same king seated on his throne between two ravens and the spear raised and burning gold.