Sephiroth One-Winged Angel — Print & Oil Painting

Nearly all the colour has been withdrawn. The picture is worked in graphite grey, black and bone white, with one exception: a small fire burning at the bottom right that throws a scatter of orange sparks up across the lower third. Nothing else in the frame is warm.

Two long lines organise the composition. The first is the Masamune, held down and out to the right, a blade so slender and so long that its tip leaves the canvas and takes the eye with it. The second is the single black wing rising from the left shoulder, feathers spreading and separating into individual quills at the top. They cross behind him in a shallow saltire.

The figure between them is deliberately still. Silver hair falls to the waist and drifts sideways in the updraught, the long black coat hangs open over a buckled harness, silver pauldrons sit high on both shoulders, and the free hand is raised near the face in a gloved fist. Only the eyes carry any intensity, pale green in a face that is otherwise expressing nothing.

Debris falls through the whole scene: ash, chips of masonry, torn paper, painted as small hard flecks that read as moving upward rather than down, which is what places the figure inside a collapse instead of in front of a backdrop.

It sits in our Final Fantasy collection as the companion to the reworked portrait of Cloud Strife, who exists in the story largely because of this man.