Terran Marine Confronts a Hybrid Horror — Print & Oil Painting

The room explains the fight. This is a laboratory: white panelled walls, a heavy articulated arm folded down out of the ceiling with red hydraulics along it, ducting and pipework, a bank of instruments on the right, and a floor of clean plate now fouled with cables and debris. Somebody built this place to hold something.

The thing it was built to hold occupies the centre. A hunched body with a pale ridged skull, a mouth of long fangs open wide, two eyes lit hard blue, spurs rising off the shoulders and a mass of limbs and tentacles trailing across the floor around it. Half that anatomy belongs to a Zerg strain and half of it does not, which is exactly what a hybrid is: the crossbreed grown in secret out of the other two species in this war.

The marine has been put at the right edge and given the smallest share of the canvas. He crouches low in white and grey plate with a sidearm held out in both hands, visor open, and the pistol is comically inadequate to the situation. The composition knows it, and stages the picture as a size comparison.

The palette is entirely cold: steel blue, grey-green and white, with the creature's eyes and a few red fittings on the machinery as the only exceptions. There is no fire anywhere and no daylight; the light comes from panels in the ceiling, which flattens everything it touches.

In the left foreground a wrecked machine leans across the corner, dark and out of focus, red rods jutting from it and a claw at the end of its arm. It gives the viewer somewhere to be standing, and it suggests the creature has already been through something. From our Starcraft collection, and the fight in a dark tunnel keeps the same enclosed underground and the same odds.