Medivh's Raven-Masked Form Wreathed in Shadow — Print & Oil Painting

The head is not a face any more. A dark cowl comes forward into a long tapering beak, ridged along the top and open slightly at the tip, with two violet eyes burning in the hollow behind it. Whether it is a mask or a skull the painting refuses to say, and the ambiguity is clearly the point.

Beneath it the shoulders have gone the same way. Great black feathers rise from both sides of the neck in overlapping ranks, sweep outward and down, and merge into the sleeves of the robe without any visible seam. From the collarbone up he is a bird; from the waist down he is a man in a coat. The transition happens somewhere in the middle and the artist has hidden it in shadow.

The colour scheme is two hues fighting for the same space. Violet-blue smoke boils up from the lower half of the frame in long curling ribbons, lit from inside, and behind him the architecture is painted in a hot rust red: broken columns, a leaning arch, a wall dissolving into haze. The two colours meet without mixing and neither one wins.

He holds a staff diagonally across the body in both fists, the shaft wrapped and bound, and the hands are the most solidly painted objects in the picture. Everything else, the feathers, the smoke, the ruin, is deliberately loose.

He does his most useful work after he is dead. Killed in his own tower by people who had good reasons, he comes back in the shape of a bird, moves between three courts that are at war with each other, tells all of them the same thing about what is coming, and is dismissed by nearly everybody who hears it. One commander eventually believes him and takes his people across the sea on that advice alone. A portrait that turns the man into a crow and gives him a wall of red ruin to stand in front of is painting the messenger and the message at once. From our World of Warcraft collection, next to the same figure standing plainly with his raven staff and the two continents his warning sent a fleet across.