Black Dragonflight Dragon Amid Fire and Smoke — Print & Oil Painting

The head comes forward out of the smoke and everything else in the picture recedes from it. It fills the upper third, jaws parted just enough to show a row of pale teeth and a hot orange throat, with a long horn sweeping back from each temple and a crest of black spines standing up behind the skull like a crown of blades. One eye burns orange in a socket of deep shadow.

The body is built out of overlapping plates rather than scales. Dark violet, oxblood and near black lie over each other down the neck and shoulders in broad slabs, each edged with a thin line of reflected fire, and the wing membranes at the left and right are stretched between ribs so heavy they read as structural beams.

Heat is kept mostly outside the animal. Orange and ochre smoke fills the corners and the lower half of the frame, rising in columns behind the wings, and only three or four points of fire are allowed to show on the creature itself: the throat, the eye, a seam under the jaw and a faint glow between the chest plates.

The format is upright and cropped tight, so the animal has no room. Wings, horns and shoulders all run off the edges, and there is no ground, no horizon and no second object anywhere for scale. It could be twenty feet long or two hundred.

The flight this creature belongs to was given the earth to look after, and its leader spent a very long time listening to voices in the deep places that told him what everyone else was planning. What came out the other end of that was a lineage bred for war instead of stewardship, and painting one of them in a smoke-filled frame with no ground under it states the case precisely: these are the dragons who stopped having a country. From our World of Warcraft collection, next to the aspect of that flight towering above a volcanic ridge and the queen of the red flight standing before crimson mountains.