Genn Greymane Standing Before a Full Moon — Print & Oil Painting

The picture has been built as a frame inside a frame. Two stone piers rise the full height of the canvas at left and right, carved from top to bottom with knotwork and worn runes, and everything else in the image is seen through the gap between them. Whatever the artist wants us to look at has been deliberately made narrow.

Through that gap: an enormous full moon, pale and slightly flattened, with a black castle spire cutting across its lower half and mountains behind. Against it stands a worgen in ornate plate, black and gold with blue stones at every joint, shoulders spiked, a red cloak falling forward down the steps at his feet. The head is a grey wolf's with a white ruff, and one eye burns a hard orange while the other stays in shadow.

Two crescents of cold blue light rise crossing in front of him from below the frame, hard-edged and translucent, and they cut the composition into wedges. Their blue is picked up again in the mist at floor level and in the gems on his armour, so the entire picture runs on two colours: that ice blue and the red of the cloth.

He is not alone and the company is unsettling. Two smaller worgen crouch on all fours at the lower left, one with its head down, and a third figure with a grey mane stands at the right. They are painted at half the finish of the central figure and none of them is looking at him.

He built the wall that let this in. Refusing an alliance he had come to distrust, this king closed his peninsula off behind a barrier across its only neck and governed a sealed country for years; when a threat arrived at the wall anyway he had a mage summon wolf-beasts to garrison it, and the garrison turned on his own soldiers, and the affliction they carried came back over the stonework and through the population, including through him. Everything in this painting, the arch, the moon, the animal face in the armour, is downstream of one closed door. From our World of Warcraft collection, next to the same king roaring in the same shape and one of his people facing an orc across a battle line.