Zerg Hive Rising Under a Fiery Sky — Print & Oil Painting

No figure appears anywhere in this canvas and the absence is what makes it work. It is a landscape painting, wide and low in the horizon, of a place where every structure has been grown instead of built: nothing here has a straight wall, a door, a window or a right angle.

The main mass rises just right of centre. A ribbed trunk swells out of the ground and opens at the top into a crown of curved spines fanning in all directions, with rows of hooked limbs stepping down its flanks like buttresses. Behind and to the left a lower dome carries its own ring of spikes, and smaller stalks lean in between them.

Colour carries the storytelling. The organisms are painted in magenta, plum and dried rose, faintly translucent wherever the light passes through them, and the sky behind is a flat wall of gold and apricot with heavy cloud banked across it. Warm on warm, with only the near ground dropped into a dark crust to hold the bottom of the picture down.

The details on that crust repay a search. Pale sac-like pods sit in clusters at the base of the trunk, dark spurs break through the ground in the foreground, and a curved blade of the same rose colour crosses the upper left corner, close to the viewer and out of focus, so you are looking at this place from inside it rather than from a safe distance.

Zerg architecture is biology the whole way down: a hive is a creature and not a shelter, and this painting takes that and treats it as a skyline. One of the very few pictures in our Starcraft collection with nobody in it. The hydralisk perched on wreckage at sunset uses the same furnace-coloured sky over ground that has already fallen.