Tifa Lockhart, Fists Raised — Print & Oil Painting

The brush has been loaded flat and used like a chisel. Almost the whole surface is built from rectangular strokes, laid down once and left alone, so the wall behind reads as a mosaic of cream, ochre and dull rose and the raised arm is a stack of blunt blocks. Nothing is smoothed, and the picture looks deliberately abandoned short of finishing.

What survives that treatment is the silhouette. Long dark hair falling past the shoulders, a cropped top, suspenders crossing the chest, a black sleeve running from the elbow down to a fingerless glove: the costume Tifa Lockhart has worn since the first version of Final Fantasy VII, reduced to five or six shapes.

The face is the most carefully handled area and it is still barely there. The eyes are lowered or closed, the mouth is one soft mark, and the head is tipped forward and away, so the expression reads as withdrawal rather than aggression.

Worth noting against the title: the raised hand is open, fingers apart and slightly curled, not clenched. Her weapons in the games are her gloves, and the painting catches that hand in the moment before it decides anything.

Only a narrow range of colour is used, cream through umber to black, with no saturated hue anywhere. Shelved in our Final Fantasy collection next to the reworked Cloud Strife, which drives the same cast in exactly the opposite direction.