Starcraft Protoss Zeratul 1 — Print & Oil Painting

Begin with what is actually on the canvas, because it is not what the title leads you to expect. A heavy figure in olive and bronze plate armour fills the centre, half kneeling, one arm locked around a second body on the ground, while a third warrior in a domed helm braces against him from the right with a red banner on a pole behind his shoulder.

The armour is medieval in cut. Segmented plates over the thighs, a rounded pauldron, a hinged skirt of tassets, a raised guard rising over the jaw, all of it worked in the same olive-gold and all of it scuffed. A long sword rises point-upward through the centre of the picture and a second blade crosses the upper left.

The handling is loose to the edge of abstraction. The ground is a smear of ochre and grey, the smoke behind is a spiral of pale paint, and the whole background has been left as a stained atmosphere with a hot green-yellow flare burning at the left and a bloom of white light behind the standing figure. Only the armour has really been drawn.

The composition is a knot. Three bodies overlap in the middle of the frame with no clear space between them, and the eye has to work out which limb belongs to whom, which is exactly the confusion a close fight produces.

The piece carries a StarCraft title in our catalogue and the painting does not support it: what is shown is a melee between armoured infantry, handled well, with no science fiction anywhere in the frame and no protoss figure in it. It is filed in our Starcraft collection with the rest, and the canvas where the dark templar meets a wall of spirits is the neighbouring work that does show the character the title names.