Kerrigan's Winged Silhouette in Darkness — Print & Oil Painting

Gold is the only thing that gets through. The canvas is otherwise so dark that its measured brightness is the lowest in this whole group, and what the eye finds first is a thin scatter of ochre and old brass: a crown of blades above the head, a run of ribbing across the chest, the edges of the plates down the abdomen. Everything else has to be hunted for.

The figure is dead centre, frontal, standing, arms hanging at the sides with the fingers curled into claws. It is the pose of a devotional panel rather than of an action illustration: no movement, no foreshortening, no ground plane. She is presented rather than caught.

The wings behind her are ragged. Four or five bladed limbs open from the shoulders in a broad fan, torn along their trailing edges, closer to shredded sailcloth than to anything grown for flight, and they merge into the black long before they reach the edge of the frame.

The body is one continuous piece of armour with no seams in it: a ribbed sternum, plated hips, a segmented waist, and long thin tendrils falling from the head over both shoulders. Only the face keeps a human proportion, and it has been given the least light in the picture.

Down in the murk on either side, two more heads with open jaws sit at knee height, faint enough that you can lose them and find them again. This is the quietest and least legible painting in our Starcraft collection, and it wants a wall with soft light on it. The version standing over her swarm in daylight is its exact opposite.