Deathwing Roaring Amid Rubble and Flame — Print & Oil Painting

Fire occupies the bottom half of this canvas as a solid mass, not as an effect. It is painted in overlapping tongues of yellow, orange and deep red with dark voids between them, it reaches almost to the midline, and out of it rise the broken uprights of what was recently a wall: a squat tower, a section of parapet, a beam leaning at forty degrees.

The dragon sits on top of that ruin with its head thrown back and its jaws open. The neck is drawn as a stack of segmented plates, the throat behind the teeth glows a hot orange, and two long horns sweep back from the skull. Both wings are up and half folded, black against a sky that is itself the colour of embers, and the far wing is deliberately left as a flat shape with no detail so the near one can carry the weight.

The measured saturation on this canvas is the highest of the six paintings of him, and effectively all of it is a single hue. Sky, smoke, stone, wing and animal have been pulled into the same red-orange register, so the only tonal separation left is between things that are lit and things that are not.

The brushwork changes with the distance. The masonry is scratched in dry and blocky, the flames are wet and blended, and the dragon itself is drawn with the hardest edges anywhere in the frame, which pulls it forward out of an image that would otherwise dissolve.

Burning a town was never the point of the exercise. He kept a cult, staffed by people who had read the same prophecy he had, and what the prophecy promised was not conquest of the world but the end of it: an hour after which nothing living continues, arranged on behalf of things older than the dragons and buried deeper. The cult did the recruiting and the sabotage; he did the arriving. A canvas that spends four fifths of itself on fire and puts the animal on top of a heap of somebody's wall has the priorities in the correct order. From our World of Warcraft collection, next to the same dragon gliding quietly through a smoky sky and the same jaws arriving over a town with its roofs still on.