A Horned Elf Conjuring Red Flame in a Dungeon — Print & Oil Painting

Two colours are fighting over the same room and neither one gives ground. The interior is lit green: green runes glowing on the wall at the left, green haze between the columns, a green-lit shape at the right that never resolves into anything nameable. Over that, on and around the figure, the artist has laid a hot scarlet, and the two hues meet all over the canvas without ever mixing.

The red is on her skin. Curling scroll-like marks run across the chest, the stomach, both upper arms and the thighs, and they are lit from inside rather than painted on, so that they read as a circuit rather than as tattooing. Around each side of her, two crescents of red-orange flame turn slowly in the air with sparks coming off them, and neither hand is directing either one.

She is very pale, almost lavender-white, with long white-blonde hair falling past the waist and two dark horns curving up from the brow. A plain dark band covers the eyes. The costume is minimal: a small dark harness above, brown leather trousers with fur at the hip, and long brown gloves that taper into blunt claws. In her raised left hand she holds a small pale object, skull-shaped, and the painting does not say what it is for.

The architecture behind is deliberately ugly. Heavy chains hang into the frame at both upper corners, a run of columns recedes into the dark, and the whole space is low, wet and windowless. Brightness sits near the bottom of the range for this group.

None of what she is wearing came free. The horns, the claws, the marks and the height are not equipment and not heredity: each one is bought by taking a demon into yourself and winning the argument that follows, and the ones who lose it are not written about. Every visible change on a body like this one is a receipt. A painting that puts the ledger on her skin in glowing red and then surrounds her with somebody else's green light has the transaction the right way round. From our World of Warcraft collection, next to another of the order crouched beside a green lake and the one who went first, raising bare claws in a green wood.