Kerrigan Unleashes Zerg Amid a Storm of Energy — Print & Oil Painting

This is the brightest canvas in the group, by measurement and by feel. The centre of it is nearly white, a pale blue-grey field of thinned paint with the ground showing through, and everything else has been dragged across that lightness in long wet strokes rather than drawn on top of it.

Those strokes are the storm. Ribbons of orange and burnt gold curve up from both bottom corners and arc over the full width of the picture; between them, blade-shaped slabs of pale blue and white float at every angle, hard-edged where the ribbons are soft. Neither set is described as an object. They are gestures with a brush, and they have been allowed to stay that way.

She stands left of centre on a low rise, small in the frame and painted almost entirely in black. The legs are braced apart, the head is tipped back, black hair streams up and away in a dozen separate flicks, and a hard band of red-orange runs across the eyes. Below the waist the armour picks up a few gold lines and a pair of heavy boots, and that is the whole figure.

The Zerg arrive on the right, and they arrive as shapes. A ridged head with a jaw of pale teeth breaks out of the mist at the lower right, a second body coils behind it, and further back the haze thickens into a form the artist declines to finish. They are suggested even more lightly than the storm is.

The whole thing behaves like an oil sketch rather than an illustration: fast, wet, worked at arm's length, confident enough to leave three quarters of the surface nearly empty. Part of our Starcraft collection, next to the winged silhouette in darkness, the same figure at the opposite end of the value scale.