The Best Lorwyn Art You Can Barely See
A course in looking
A note before beginning: last month, I wrote an article for Hipsters of the Coast on the exile zone, and I’m quite proud of it. Give it a read!
On January 26, Wizards of the Coast previewed a card for next week’s release of Alchemy: Lorwyn: “Providence of Night.”
It’s a Timmy-bait EDH card from, literally, top (with its satisfying W/U U/B B/R R/G G/W mana cost) to bottom (with its hilarious ability, which, in clear dialogue with a Lorwyn Eclipsed sub-theme and more opaque dialogue with the recent EDH-color-identity controversy, dares you to construct an “Oops, all hybrid-mana-cost” deck).
In other words, it’s made for me. I love this little freak, even the poor text spacing that makes the “r” in the “Avatar” typeline encroach on the Alchemy set symbol.
But even more interesting than the card is Justin Gerard’s painting—and the astonishing change that happens when it’s scaled down to the low resolution of a MTG: Arena card.
Like all the illustrations for every Alchemy card, whose relegation to tiny onscreen images belies their often-amazing quality, this painting deserves your full attention, maybe even more.
It’s hard enough to pay full attention to anything (I say, as someone who’s about to wander away to heat up my coffee, ponder whether I want a snack, decide that I don’t, wander over, flip through the copy Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars on my desk, and then come back here) it’s hard enough I was saying, to pay full attention to anything, and even harder to do so in the Magic media ecosystem. There’s always something new and maybe cool or maybe infuriating jockeying for our attention and then volleying it to something else. Attentional momentum prevents us from pausing.
Pausing, however, is what I want to invite you to do here. Spend time with me on this one, singular illustration—and let’s learn, together, how to read it.
The God of the World
We can begin with the self-reflexive question that, from a viewer’s perspective, seems to arise at the very moment you rest your eyes on an image: what am I looking at?
Let’s gather some context. “Providence of Night” is a fixture of, creature in, and incarnation of, the world of Lorwyn-Shadowmoor. As its hybrid color identity, typeline, and name all suggest, “Providence of Night” succeeds the Lorwyn-Shadowmoor mega-block’s ten-card Spirit Avatar cycle.
Spread across Eventide and Shadowmoor, these two ten-color entities are mysterious incarnations of feelings or natural phenomena or emotions, and all boast awesome names: Godhead of Awe, Ghastlord of Fugue, Demigod of Revenge, Deus of Calamity, Oversoul of Dusk, Divinity of Pride, Dominus of Fealty, Deity of Scars, Nobilis of War, and Overbeing of Myth. (I’m impressed they could find ten cool titles for “god” in that cycle, and I assume they spent the 18-year gap between Lorwyn-Shadowmoor block and Lorwyn Eclipsed thinking of a new one).
Our titular subject is thus a primeval god in this world, a concept made animate: the night itself.
What sort of god is it? Like its forebears, it defies physical logic, but seems to echo that which we understand; its body boasts complex reticulated parts and eerie geometries; it has personality, yet its mind seems somehow alien from our own; it’s marked by unknowable hieroglyphics, perhaps self-printed or perhaps predating the entity itself; it hovers askew of reality; it dwarfs the world around it, but the world seems to bend to its will.
But so much more is expressed in Gerard’s absurd, amazing, intricate detail.
Arms of flesh blooming from a chest of caged bone. Strange, unsettling hands. Etched horns and curved, pointed ears, which bear an inexplicable resemblance to those of Lorwyn elves.
Grass that seems at once to pull towards and yank away from the Providence’s power. Water and trees that swirl with esoteric geometries. Ancient pylons lifting into the air like magnets reacting to a sympathetic force. Glowing fireflies set abuzz by the sudden inrush of deep, mysterious, beatific-gothic vitality.
An adult and child, tiny in the foreground but rendered in sharp detail, staring impassively, as though at a wonder of the universe. Serene; small. Gazing on the forces that move the world.
Gerard’s style is storytelling, characterology, and worldbuilding all at once. While many of his paintings are absurdly detailed, this one stands out to me for its poetic mysticism. It needs no bombastic action nor exaggerated expression to show that, when we look on the Providence, we look at a power synonymous with reality itself—not a monster upon the earth or an alien invading it, but the outflung expression of the universe. Allow me to quote the German Romantic Goethe, who writes in Faust of the power of the “Earth-Spirit:”
In the floods of life and creative storm
To and fro I wave.
Weave eternally.
And birth and grave,
An eternal sea,
A changeful strife,
A glowing life:
At the roaring loom of the ages I plod
And fashion the life-giving garment of God. (ll. 501-509, trans. Walter Kaufmann)
I think he would’ve liked Gerard’s painting a lot.
Follow the Lines
There’s another way to look at this illustration, and it starts by reframing that earlier question.
As I said, it can often seem like the first thing we do when we see a painting is to pose a question: what am I looking at? What is the representational content of this image? But maybe what isn’t really the first thing that happens when I look at something. Perhaps, before we ask what we feel how.
Perhaps, as the nineteenth-century aesthetic philosopher Vernon Lee suggests, the act of looking begins with something more foundational. Lee suggests that to perceive something is to be at once receptive and perceptive. Base sensations like color and sound have the power of “invading and subjugating us,” but then, in turn, our minds actively “grasp[] or tak[e] in” those sensations and assemble them into shapes, partially constructing the thing we encounter before us. In so doing, she says, “we are doing something with our attention, or our attention is doing something in us: a travelling about, a returning to starting points, a summing up.” The perceiving mind ventures out, synthesizes the pieces it finds, and then returns to compose the thing that we, in fact, perceive.
TL;DR: before we even ask what we’re looking at, our minds have assembled something for us to perceive, something not entirely in our control, something that modulates our attention and moves us without our intention. The experience of artistic form does something to us.
In short, another way of reading an illustration, like this one, is to follow where our eyes take us, the way they seem to be drawn in and around.
And so let’s start again.
We can begin in the center, where the eye—my eye, at any rate—magnetizes to a hand, whose stony roughness and sharp claws belie its delicate posing. The pads of its hand (the thenar and hypothenar, if we might say such creatures as this are close enough for our anatomical terms to stick onto them) curl outward like a heart.
The viewer’s gaze, widening, travels in either or both directions up the curve of the hand, then up the ridged knuckles, then across bladed fingernails and joins back together. From there we leap, the eye padding across Gerard’s thick swiping brushstrokes up to the painting’s focal point: the eclipsed sun, which, in contrast with the gray-green of its surroundings, flares pale gold fire, lighting the sky in wisps of burnt umber.
The painting can, if we let it, direct our eye elsewhere. Up, through the fluming solar gold and into the midnight clouds tigerstriping the landscape. We’re given a choice, at this point: should the eye travel left right?
If we got right, then we slide along the ragged arc the light makes as it pierces the gloom, down and down—and then up and to the left, into the inky tendrils of shadow that the Providence seems to peel away with its hand. Then, perhaps, up the fingers and back into the sun. Or…
…perhaps we reverse direction, traveling down the line of the creature’s forearm, slipping across the gaseous shadow hanging about it and down the ichorous tendons linking it to the earth, and then to the tiny figures, straight and statuesque but soft-lined in the shadow, at the foreground.
No rest for the wicked, however:
The spirals of water swirling in the tidal pools yank us, as though vortically, away from the figures, through the rippling morass of moving water, and then, as they regurgitate us like swamp gas, we sweep up the strange levitating pylons, across the flight trajectory of this flock of bats, and back into the oozing shadows—
—and from there, back to the Providence and the eclipsed sun.
And that, keep in mind, is just if we go to the right. We could go to the left, which might offer its own spiraling path; along the way, we might get lost in any number of line-threaded thickets. With apologies to Gerard, here’s an attempt to render the way the eye might move through this illustration:
As you can see, mazes in microcosm thread everywhere in Gerard’s illustration: the floating stones, the swirling water, the avatar’s etched horns. To look on this painting is, in one way, about being unable to look away, to be transfixed—as the titular entity is by the eclipsing sun.
And so if a painting can be “interested” in something (and I believe they can be: paintings are thought in form, fixations incarnated in pigment and composition), it isn’t just interested just in a cool-looking demigod (though that’s there too). This illustration is teaching us to think about the ways the eye can be made to traverse over a space, or, better put, to be led through it, absorbed into its labyrinths.
What a great irony that this illustration, which is about flows of attention, appears on a card that might be destined to go unnoticed—an Alchemy card.
This isn’t just an issue with “Providence of Night,” of course. Magic-art-agent-and-afficiando-and-also-best-guy-in-the-world Donny Caltrider has highlighted, art on MTG: Arena often goes underappreciated and underremarked. This is in part, I think, because of the game’s low-resolution images, but it’s also to do with the glut of other visual stimuli in the game. A card illustration can become just one cluster of pixels among many.
There’s thus a special meta-artistic force to “Providence of Night”: it’s an invitation to tumble in and become lost. And, fitting with the image’s grim atmosphere, that prospect is mysterious and a little somber: echoing some remarks I’ve made previously, to be in this painting is to be devoured by it—and not all settings, not all games, want you to be devoured.
Look Twice
It’s possible I’m making a lot out of this one image. I might just be overstating the power of something I find really, really cool. But I’m going to gamble that there’s something real in Gerard’s illustration, and that it’s worth a close look, or maybe a few close looks.
Even if this painting doesn’t do it for you, I hope that you can use this process to spend time with another Magic illustration—particularly one that hasn’t gotten a lot of love. See, if you can do something with your attention—or, in Lee’s words, see if your attention is doing something in you.
It never ceases to amaze me how such beautiful artworks goes under the radar so many times. One of the best examples of this is how planeswalkers are shown in full art once in the battlefield, and I found myself letting the timers run just to admire these masterful illustrations. Amazing article!
Really smart article, as always. Art critics write a lot about what the eye is drawn to but I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone suggest that that motion could actually be mimetic. Lorwyn I wish you the best!