The Labyrinth’s Threshold — Print & Oil Painting

The whole image is one scale relationship. A child stands with her back to us at the bottom centre of a wide frame, small, in a plain coat and buckled shoes, and everything else in the picture is enormous. The tree ahead of her rises to fill the upper half, its two great roots curling outward and up like a pair of horns, and the gap between them is a single vertical shaft of white light.

Colour is split cleanly in two. The forest is cold, blue green going almost to black in the trunks that frame the left and right edges, wet and mossy at the ground. The light in the centre is warm and blown out, and nothing else in the frame comes anywhere near it. The path leads straight into it, which is the sort of composition that leaves a viewer no choice.

Note the framing: this is a wide cinematic ratio, held symmetrically, with the child placed on the exact centre line. Nothing is off balance and nothing is hidden. It reads as a still from a moving picture rather than as a painting made from the outside, and the format is worth planning for, since it wants width on a wall rather than height.

The film it comes from keeps two worlds running at once and never quite tells you which one to trust. This image is the hinge: a girl at a doorway made of roots, with dark behind and light ahead, at the second before either reading is confirmed.

From our Pan's Labyrinth collection. Its companion, The Labyrinth's Ancient Oath, goes down the stairs this one is standing at the top of.