Dark Angels Advancing Beneath a Meteor Sky — Print & Oil Painting

The sky is doing something violent and quiet at the same time. A peach and lilac ceiling of cloud runs across the top third of the canvas, and through it four or five bright objects fall on parallel courses, each trailing a thin white line behind a small orange head. Nothing about the way they are painted suggests noise. It reads as weather.

Below it two armoured figures come forward across a flat white field. Their plate is a deep matt green, chipped along the edges, and over it they wear heavy bone-coloured robes with the hoods up, the cloth given real weight so that it hangs and creases the way canvas does. The nearer figure holds a large green shield-shaped plate low across the body; the further one carries a red-cased weapon two-handed at the hip.

Between and behind them a standard goes up on a long pole, its red banner worked with a pale winged device and hung with skulls, with a second smaller icon further back. It is the tallest thing in the picture and the artist has let it lean, which stops the group from looking arranged.

The ground is the part that stays with you. The bottom quarter of the canvas is a windrow of the dead, tan and rust-coloured armour piled where it fell and half buried in white ash, and the two green figures are walking over it without looking down.

Those robes are inheritance rather than decoration. The Dark Angels came out of a forest world whose fighting orders lived as monastic knights, and when the Legion was raised the habit came with it: ceramite underneath, a monk's robe over the top, worn on the line and never explained to anyone. Part of our Warhammer 40.000 collection, with the same Chapter painted as dark medieval knights for where the costume began.