Teldrassil's Great Tree Glows Beneath a Full Moon — Print & Oil Painting

The tree occupies the entire upper half of the canvas as a single dark mass and the artist has resisted every temptation to describe it. Its canopy spreads out flat, wider than it is tall, with the branch structure showing only as darker veins inside a silhouette, and it runs off both edges of the frame. Below it the trunk swells into a shape more like a hill than a stem, and the island it stands on is barely distinguishable from the roots.

What makes the mass legible is that it has been inhabited. Dozens of small warm gold lights are scattered up the trunk and around the base, in clusters and in strings, with two or three cold green points among them, and a pale thread that reads as a waterfall or a path runs down one flank. None of these is drawn as a window or a lamp; they are single dabs, and the eye assembles a population out of them.

The sky behind is where the painting spends its colour. Banks of cloud in rose, plum and violet pile up at the left and centre, lit from somewhere low, and a large white moon sits clear of them at the right with stars scattered above. The moon is not the light source for the tree, which stays dark against it, and that refusal is what gives the picture its scale.

At the foot of the canvas the water is nearly black, with a thin bright line where it meets the shore. At the lower right two or three tiny figures stand on a spit of rock beside a small orange fire, and at the lower left a structure and a few more lights sit at the waterline. Measured hue is blue violet then blue with the brightness low; the gold in the tree accounts for a fraction of a percent of the surface and carries the entire meaning of the picture.

This tree was grown on purpose and it was not approved. The druids who raised it wanted to recover the agelessness their people had lost, and when they asked the great dragons for the blessings that had protected the previous world tree, two of them refused outright and called the request arrogant. It was grown anyway, unblessed, and the flaw showed: sickness worked its way up through the wood for years, and the nation living in the branches spent most of its existence treating a tree that had been condemned before it was planted. Shown in our World of Warcraft collection with the city that lived in those branches, seen through blue mist and one of the dragons who refused, holding her dragon topped staff.