Grey Knight Standing Over a Slain Daemon's Skull — Print & Oil Painting

Read this one from the bottom upward, because it has been built like a monument. At the base, a vast horned skull in orange-brown with its jaws open and tusks curling past the edges of the frame. Standing on it, a knight in silver and gold. Behind him, an enormous disc of light. The stack is deliberate and the argument is not subtle.

The armour is the finest passage in the picture: cream-white and steel plate with gold filigree worked into every joint, a red plume behind the shoulder, a scroll swinging at the hip, and a long golden staff planted point down into the skull with both hands closed over it. The pose is shut and vertical, as still as the thing beneath it is chaotic.

Colour has been cut back to two families, the burnt orange of the sun disc and the dead daemon, and the cool metal of the figure. A pale banner marked with a row of black teeth breaks the right side, and dark green horns curve in from the left and the bottom to close the composition like a frame.

A slain daemon in this setting is never permanently dead, only sent back, which lends the trophy pose an irony the painting seems aware of: the victory is real and it is also temporary. It belongs to our Warhammer 40.000 collection, and pairs with the Grey Knight battling a rotting Chaos daemon.