USS Enterprise Hovering Above a Mountain Lake — Print & Oil Painting

Down in the lower left, on a shelf of rock, stands a single human figure in a dark suit with their arms at their sides. They occupy perhaps a hundredth of the canvas, and every other decision in the picture exists to be measured against them.

What they are looking at hangs motionless above a lake: a hull several hundred metres long, held at low altitude with no visible effort, its reflection lying unbroken on water so still it doubles the whole scene. Snow peaks run along the far shore, a green slope drops in from the right, and the light is the flat cool blue of a high valley in the early morning.

The vessel is a redesign rather than the familiar shape, and the difference is worth naming: the saucer has been flattened and drawn out into a long blade, the hull built up in layered plates, the nacelles faired into the body as slender lines. It is recognisably of the same navy and not of the same drawing board.

The handling is concept art, wide and cinematic, with the detail concentrated along the ship and the landscape left broad. It is one of the few pieces in the collection with a horizon in it. From our Star Trek collection, and a companion to USS Voyager Flying Above a Sea of Clouds, the other painting here that puts a starship inside weather.