A lion and a lamb standing together, and the lion is made of water.
The body and mane are worked in blues and whites that run horizontally across him, so what you are reading as a lion is also a stretch of sea with the light on it. The head and face are painted straight, warm gold and amber, fully a lion. The lamb beside him is pale and solid and entirely itself, small enough to stand under his chin.
They are on open ground with hills going back into haze and a heavy sky above.
The division is the whole picture
Only part of the lion dissolves. His face stays warm and literal while everything behind it turns into weather and water, and the meeting point runs roughly along the line of his jaw.
That was the decision the painting stood or fell on. Dissolve all of him and he stops being a lion, and the pairing with the lamb loses its force. Dissolve none of him and it is an illustration of two animals. Keeping the face and letting the mane go is what lets him be both a thing and an idea at once.
Warm against cool
Nearly all of the painting is cool. Blue mane, blue-grey sky, hills gone violet with distance. The warm passages are small and deliberate: the lion face, the gold along the lamb back, a band of sand in the foreground.
That imbalance is why it feels calm rather than dramatic. There is not enough warmth in it to raise the temperature, and cool colours recede, so the whole picture sits back from you a little.
What pastel did
The transitions again, the same as in Bear. Where the mane becomes sea the edge has to be genuinely uncertain, and pastel will give you that with a fingertip in a way that almost nothing else will.
The lamb is the opposite treatment. Tight, controlled, edges kept crisp, so that the contrast between the two animals is not only in what they are but in how they are painted.
On a wall
At 11 × 9 it does not need much room. It is quiet from across a space and it rewards standing close, which makes it a better fit for a study or a bedroom than a hallway you walk through quickly.
It wants a plain wall and, if you can manage it, light from one side rather than straight on.
One original. The original is here and the print is here.
The other animal pieces are together here, and everything else is in the gallery.
— DawnE