Arcturus Mengsk Addresses the Dominion Marines — Print & Oil Painting

The same badge is repeated all over this picture, and the repetition is the point. A red shield carrying a black star hangs across the back wall as a row of enormous banners, and it appears once more, small and enamelled, bolted to the front of the lectern the speaker is gripping. Before you have read a face you have read an institution.

He is caught mid-sentence, mouth open, the near fist raised and closed, and the hands are what sell it: one clamped over the front edge of the podium, the other held up at chest height in the gesture a man makes when he is telling a room something he decided a long time ago. Grey hair swept back, a short grey beard, deep lines around the eyes.

His clothes separate him from everybody else in the frame. A heavy gold mantle over the shoulders, a dark high-collared coat with a gold clasp at the throat, ox-blood leather gauntlets to the elbow: a costume assembled out of court dress rather than out of a supply depot.

Behind and above him the marines are painted deliberately as a wall. Crimson powered armour with the shoulder plates flaring out past the helmets, amber visors reading as slots rather than as faces, one rifle barrel angled across the lower left corner. Not one of them is looking at the man speaking; they are already facing outward.

Arcturus Mengsk led the Sons of Korhal against the Confederacy and then crowned himself Emperor of the Terran Dominion on its ruins, and this canvas belongs to the second act rather than the first. It opens our Starcraft collection, and the men in armour behind him get a picture of their own in the marines advancing beneath a battlecruiser.