Neelix in Profile, Painted in Warm Colors — Print & Oil Painting

The hair has been treated as architecture. It rises off the forehead in a swept vertical crest, combed back into long parallel ridges, and drops again at the jaw into two thick side whiskers, so the head is framed above and below by the same tawny material.

Between them the skin does the storytelling. Mottled orange freckling covers the temple and one cheek in a patch with a soft edge, corrugated ridges run front to back across the crown, and the paint is kept slightly translucent over all of it, pink and gold laid thin so the structure underneath stays readable. The ears are large and set low. He is turned three quarters away and looking out past the right edge of the frame, and there is nothing cheerful in the expression at all.

The clothes are the loudest thing here: a tan jacket with a whole patchwork of muted greens, blues and oranges worked into the lower left, over a dark red collar. Behind him the ground is a flat cool grey, which is the picture's one real tension, since every warm colour in it is worn rather than cast.

Low on the chest, small and easy to miss, sits a silver delta. He was never Starfleet and never wore the uniform; the badge was issued to him as a member of the crew, and at the end of the journey he stayed behind in that quadrant as the Federation's ambassador to it. From our Star Trek collection, alongside Seven of Nine in a Starship Corridor, the other passenger who joined that ship the long way round.