Grommash Hellscream Brooding on His Throne — Print & Oil Painting

Two enormous tusks rise from the floor on either side of the seat, curve inward, and stop just short of meeting above his head. They are the palest objects in the picture and they turn the whole composition into a bracket with a man inside it. Fold the canvas down the middle and the two halves match almost exactly.

Almost nothing else is allowed to be legible. The saturation reading here is the lowest of the five paintings of him by a clear margin and the contrast is lower still, so the greens, greys and browns sit within a very narrow band and the eye has to work for every edge. Shapes hang in the gloom overhead that never resolve.

He is pushed back into the chair with the shoulders low. Two heavy pauldrons of bone-white plate carry red markings and a small skull apiece, fur is stuffed under both arms, and a dark kilt of studded leather falls between the knees. A larger skull is set into the base of the throne below him, jaws forward, catching what light there is.

The face is the only warm passage: brown skin, black hair falling straight on both sides, tusks up from the lower jaw, and eyes that are looking at nothing in particular. Behind the seat a dull red hanging climbs the wall and stops before it reaches the top of the frame.

There is a version of him who said no. In one account of these events, on a version of his own world where the cup was offered and refused, the same chieftain kept his people out of the bargain and then armed them himself, industrially, with foundries and siege engines and an iron discipline that had nothing demonic about it at all, and made them a worse problem sober than they had ever been possessed. A portrait this dark and this symmetrical, with a man sitting still inside a frame of bone, suits that reading better than any battlefield would. Kept in our World of Warcraft collection with the warlords of that other world standing united in the mist and the same chieftain seated beneath hanging chains and hooks.