Tyrande Reaching for Illidan Underwater — Print & Oil Painting

The whole canvas is water and the light is coming through the ceiling. A silvered surface runs across the top of the frame with its underside rippling, and beneath it the green-blue falls away through teal into a deep bottle colour at the lower left. No canvas in this lot reads brighter, and the brightness is in the water rather than in either figure.

She swims from right to left with both arms forward and her body fully extended, in a pale gown that has gone weightless: the skirt trails behind her in a long yellow-white plume that merges into her hair. The hair is the best passage in the picture, running from dark blue at the scalp through teal, then rust-orange, then bleached gold at the ends, spread across the entire upper half of the frame like weed in a current. Silver bands sit at the wrist, the upper arm and the waist.

What she is reaching for is at the extreme left edge, cropped by the frame, and it is barely more than a profile: a dark green face with the eyes closed, a heavy jaw, and one long ridged horn sweeping up out of the water. Her fingertips are perhaps a hand's width from his cheek and the painting stops there.

Both faces are calm. Nobody is struggling, no bubbles rise from either mouth, and the two figures are lit from the same source above, which makes the scene read as suspension rather than as rescue.

No such swim appears in the histories, and the water is the painter's own addition. What is recorded is stranger: she is the one who walked into the prison where he had been kept for ten thousand years, released him herself, and did it against the judgement of every other night elf including his own brother, on the grounds that the war then starting needed exactly what he was. A picture of her reaching for a face that cannot see her is a fair image of that decision. Part of our World of Warcraft collection, beside the demon she let out, roaring in a green wood and her own official portrait in the robes of a high priestess.