Deathwing fighting with dragons — Print & Oil Painting

The canvas is two and a half times as wide as it is tall and it has been packed corner to corner with dragon. Four heads press into the frame from four directions and none of them is given room: a great gold and bronze flank climbing out of the lower left, a horned crimson head roaring at the top centre, a black muzzle with fire spilling from it at the right, and a blue-violet jaw pushing up from the bottom right corner. A fifth, tiny and dark, banks across the sky behind them.

Every one of those bodies is described by its scale pattern rather than by its outline. The gold has broad overlapping plates and a chevron band running down the neck; the crimson is finer and more feathered around the jaw; the black is spined and pitted, with fissures of orange running between the plates; the blue is smooth and ridged. In a picture this crowded, texture is the only thing keeping the flights apart.

The fire is doing the composition. It leaves the black muzzle as a short hard jet of white and orange at the exact centre of the canvas, and everything else in the picture leans toward that point: the gold neck, the crimson jaw, the blue snout. There is no landscape, no ground and no sky, only a churning brown and rust atmosphere behind.

Saturation runs high here and it is almost entirely warm. Even the blue dragon has been pulled toward violet so that nothing cools the picture down, which is unusual, and it makes the whole scene feel like an argument conducted at close range in a small room.

Four against one is how it ended. The other flights could not put the black one down with claws, so they poured what was left of their own essence into a single object and handed it to a mortal shaman to fire, and the shot that finished the destroyer at a whirlpool in the middle of the sea drained the lenders as well. A picture that gives four colours of dragon equal footage and lets one of them breathe first has the arithmetic right. Part of our World of Warcraft collection, alongside the crimson queen painted in her own shape, held down by chains and the black one alone, towering above a volcanic ridge.