Fëanor

Fëanor (here the gem cutter Paul Sanders) was one of the characters created by J. R. R. Tolkien. He played a crucial role in the prehistory of The Lord of the Rings. It was he who created the Silmarils, the three gems which preserved the light of the Two Trees in the Edenic distant past of what became Middle Earth. Fëanor also created the palantiri, the ‘seeing stones’ which played a crucial role in The Lord of the Rings.

The actual subject of this portrait is Paul Sanders, who at the time was designing and cutting gemstones. Paul was kind enough to allow me to photograph him, his workshop and many of his beautiful jewels.

I was experimenting with multilayered photomosaic pieces. Each layer had a grid of images of a single size. Each layer’s grid size was unique. I would ‘carve’ away most of each layer to reveal what I thought was the best result. Having done printmaking, I consider this a form of print making.

The image size of Fëanor (Paul Sanders) is 29,700 pixels wide by 19,800 pixels high.