Terran Wraith Soars Above a Fiery Battlefield — Print & Oil Painting

The proportion is extreme, close to a strip of cinema film, and the artist has used all that width to make the aircraft small. It sits left of centre, dark grey against dark grey, its landing struts still hanging down, and it occupies perhaps a fortieth of the surface. Everything else is sky, smoke and ground.

Light comes from one event. A large orange detonation is going off in the middle distance to the right of the fighter, and it lights the underside of the smoke column above it, the rim of the aircraft's wing, the tops of the vehicles below and nothing else. Away from that glow the canvas falls to a cold blue-black in which shapes can be counted but not identified.

The ground repays a close look. Tracked vehicles sit in ones and twos across the plain with their headlamps on, a low structure burns at the far right, small fires are scattered through the middle distance, and thin lines of tracer cross the gaps between them. None of it is drawn in detail. All of it is placed exactly where it needs to be for the depth to work.

The Wraith is the terran fighter built to disappear: it carries a cloaking device, and its usual job is to be somewhere the other side has not thought to look. Painting it as a small dark shape crossing a huge lit field is a good joke about that. In our Starcraft collection, alongside the battlecruisers holding orbit above a distant world.