Jim Raynor Piloting His Battlecruiser — Print & Oil Painting

The canvas is cut in two by a canopy frame. The left half is a dim interior of padded seat, harness and grey plating; the right half is an orange sky seen through faceted glass, with a warship in it and the flash of ordnance going off far below. Two quite different paintings, joined along a diagonal strut.

The ship outside is the reason to look. It hangs at an angle across the upper right, a slab-sided capital vessel built from stacked decks and gun housings, two circular engine ports burning white, and it is close enough that the glass cannot contain it. The silhouette is the terran battlecruiser, the largest thing that side of the war puts into the air.

He sits in the near seat with both gloved hands on the controls, and the cockpit around him is plainly not that ship: it is small, personal and cramped, the frame passing within inches of his shoulder. What the picture actually shows is a pilot in a fighter canopy with the capital vessel outside it.

He is painted in the same warm rust as the sky, which welds him into the view: a sleeveless vest over a grey shirt, a row of cylindrical charges strapped across the chest, a small badge on the back of one glove, long hair tied back, a trimmed beard. The high green headrest behind him is the one cool note in the frame.

His face is turned three-quarters away, watching the warship rather than the instruments. Filed in our Starcraft collection beside the marines advancing beneath a battlecruiser, which puts the same class of ship over the heads of the infantry.