Garrosh Hellscream Charging with a Massive Axe — Print & Oil Painting

Red rags do the framing. Four or five long torn banners hang from poles behind him, two on each side, and the wind has pulled them into the frame so that they cross the upper corners and close the composition like curtains. They are the only red in the picture and the artist has hung them at four different depths.

He comes forward at a walk rather than a run. The weight is on the leading foot, the shoulders are square, the free hand is open at the hip, and the axe is carried low in the right fist with its head turned outward. Nothing about the body is airborne or extended. It is the advance of somebody who is not worried about arriving late.

The axe head is the most finished object here: a broad crescent of dark steel with a spiked back, gold tracery inlaid along the flat, and a hooked spur under the blade, all of it drawn with hard edges against a soft grey sky. His armour by comparison is scavenged looking, bone pauldrons bound with strap and chain, a belt of skulls, plain brown breeches.

The ground and the sky are handled as one grey mass, with smoke rolling up from the bottom edge and a scatter of dark pikes leaning out of it at the right. There is no horizon line. The whole background has been kept deliberately unresolved so the silhouette can carry the picture.

The weapon in that fist is older than most of the buildings in this collection. It was forged three generations before the father who made it famous, and the family story is that an ancestor used it to kill six of the giants of that world and sealed their hearts into the metal. The grandfather who owned it next died with it buried in a giant's eye, and the son inherited an axe that had already outlived two owners. Handing it down again to the orc in this painting was meant as an honour. Part of our World of Warcraft collection, beside his father gripping a curved blade of his own and the same orc seated on the throne that came with it.