Kerrigan Spreads Her Wings Amid an Explosion — Print & Oil Painting

The two wings do the architecture. They rise from behind the shoulders, curve out to the left and right edges of the canvas and lean back in at the top, so that the figure ends up standing inside a pointed arch made of her own bone. Blue current runs along their inner edges in short jagged lengths, lighting the frame from within and leaving the outer surfaces almost black.

Underneath, the ground is on fire. A gold and amber bloom fills the lower centre, and small dark shapes move through it, foreshortened, coming towards the viewer. The painting gives that fire no visible source, and it holds the only warm colour in an image otherwise mixed from slate, charcoal and steel blue.

She herself is oddly still. The arms are held low and open with the palms forward, the head is lifted, the long cords of hair hang almost straight down, and the carapace over the ribs and hips has been drawn with the segmented precision of an insect rather than the smoothness of armour. Nothing about the pose is a lunge. It is a display.

Above the arch the sky is pale, overcast and entirely empty except for one bare branch reaching in from the left, and that small piece of dead wood does more for the scale of the picture than the fire does. From our Starcraft collection. The winged silhouette in darkness takes the same shape and puts every light in it out.