Ork Warboss Towering Over Fallen Red Marines — Print & Oil Painting

The weather is lovely. A high blue sky, white cumulus stacked along the horizon, a range of hills going soft and violet in the distance: this is the sort of afternoon a landscape painter would set up for. Everything in front of it is a disaster.

The Warboss stands at the top of the frame with that sky behind him, which is what makes him look enormous. His helmet carries two great pale horns curving up and out and a white skull bolted at the brow; his face is green, daubed blue across the cheek, jaw pushed forward. A slab-sided gun rests back over the left shoulder with two human skulls swinging off it on cords. He wears a tan coat over the shoulder plates, spiked steel at the arms, and a black and white chequered panel at the shoulder.

Beneath him a rank of his own kind, black helmets and green faces, stacked together and receding to the left. Beneath them, filling the bottom quarter of the canvas, a heaped mass of Space Marines in scarlet plate seen from close above, helmets marked with a black device and one red faceplate turned up out of the press. Packed that tightly, whether they are still coming forward or already down is left for the viewer to settle.

The paint is opaque and traditional, laid on with a stiff brush over a visible canvas weave, colours mixed rather than blended, edges left frank. The Orks are painted with obvious pleasure and the marines are painted quickly, which tells you where the artist's interest was.

What happens next in that heap is worth knowing. Orks are not animals in any ordinary sense, they are fungal: they shed spores throughout their lives and shed a great many at the moment of death, and those spores go into the ground and begin the cycle again. A world that has hosted an afternoon like this one has been seeded for the next war. Killing them on the spot is, in the long run, a way of planting them. Part of our Warhammer 40.000 collection, alongside a horde of them charging under chequered banners and Ghazghkull Thraka's Orks clashing with marines at Armageddon.