Jim Raynor Beside His Battle-Damaged Mech — Print & Oil Painting

Dust is the only colour this landscape owns. Red-brown buttes stand in three receding planes, the sky above them is a flat gold haze with a small sun low at the left, and there is no proper horizon, only a place where the rock stops being solid. A wide, hot, empty picture with two things in it.

The first is the machine, and its paint tells the story. A teal-green plate makes up the head, scraped back to bare metal along every edge, punched with heavy rivets and split by a long crack; below it a dark armature of pistons and joints with a dull amber light burning somewhere inside. Only the head and one shoulder are in frame, which makes it feel larger than the canvas.

The second is the man leaning on it. He stands square with his weight on one leg, the right arm stretched out to lay a hand flat on the machine's crown, the other fist planted on his hip inside a heavy plated gauntlet. A dirty cream shirt, a dark vest with buckled straps and a red panel, a wide belt, blue trousers, tattoos down the right forearm.

The gesture is proprietorial and slightly weary, the pose of somebody taking stock of damage rather than posing beside a trophy, and the expression agrees with it: brows level, mouth closed, eyes on something past the left edge of the frame.

That low sun rakes across both of them, catching the top of the shoulder, the edge of the jaw and the upper rim of the machine, and everything below the waist drops into deep bronze shadow. Part of our Starcraft collection, next to the loose studio portrait of the same man, painted with no landscape at all.