The DS9 Crew Standing Beneath the Station — Print & Oil Painting

Seven figures stand shoulder to shoulder across the lower half of the sheet, evenly spaced and square to us. Nobody is moving. It is the format of a group photograph, and the artist has resisted every temptation to arrange it more dynamically than that.

They are dressed for something. Black and dark leather throughout, long coats, heavy boots, no division colour anywhere: a rifle held upright by the woman at the centre with its cable coiled at her shoulder, another carried flat across the body at the far left, a flat device held in both hands at the right, and one figure third from the left in ornate pale armour under long dark hair. Reddish rock rises behind them, the ground underfoot is dark and wet, and white specks fall across the entire surface of the picture.

Above, taking the whole top half, hangs a vast structure seen from underneath: silver-grey plating, a broad orange chevron curving through it, a lettered oval panel, a circular blue grille glowing below and to the left. Honesty requires the note that it reads as the belly of a large starship rather than as the ring-and-pylon station the title names, and the rock underfoot means nobody here is standing on either of them.

The painting is oil-handled cover work, warm greys against a violet starfield. What it gets right is the temperature: this was the one series that stayed in one place, put a war in front of the cast and left it there, and a group portrait in which everybody is armed and nobody is smiling is the correct one to have made. From our Star Trek collection, with Kira Nerys Smiling Against a Violet Backdrop for a Bajoran officer painted off duty.