Kira Nerys Smiling Against a Violet Backdrop — Print & Oil Painting

The background is one graded violet and holds nothing whatsoever. No stars, no bulkhead, no props: only a soft lightening directly behind the head and a deepening at the corners, which throws the entire weight of the picture onto the face.

And the face is smiling. Not broadly and not for anybody's camera: a closed mouth with the corners drawn slightly up and a matching softening around the eyes, the expression of somebody halfway through being told something they approve of. Across the whole collection this is one of the rarer things to find on a Bajoran officer.

The features are worked with a soft brush under warm light from the left. The nose ridges are drawn as a short stack of fine horizontal lines running up between the brows; the hair is a cropped auburn cut pushed back off the forehead; and from her right ear hangs a chain with a looped pendant, painted in cold silver against warm skin.

The uniform is not Starfleet. It is the rust-red of the Bajoran militia: quilted panels across the shoulders, a stand collar, two pieces of worked metal at the throat and shoulder where pips would sit. She came into that job out of a resistance cell rather than an academy, and neither the ridges nor the earring is ornament; both are a nationality that an occupying power had spent decades trying to file away. From our Star Trek collection, alongside Ro Laren in a Monochrome Brushstroke Portrait.