Nagrand's Floating Isles Above a Green Valley — Print & Oil Painting

The valley underneath is completely ordinary and that is the point. Green terraces step down toward a pale river, low ranges recede in three or four blue-grey layers, scrub and bare rock fill the near ground, and a hard sandstone ledge takes up the right foreground with a real geologist's attention to bedding and fracture. Painted on its own it would be a study of a wide upland country.

Then there is the sky. Four islands of the same rock hang in the air at different depths, the largest at the upper left, each one carrying grass and a few trees on its crown, and from the underside of each falls a column of water that thins, breaks and stops without ever arriving anywhere. Two or three smaller ones sit further off as pale specks.

The waterfalls are the detail that does the damage. A floating rock is a shape; a floating rock with a river running off it has been there long enough to have weather. That single decision is what makes the picture read as a place rather than as an effect.

Light and colour are handled with real restraint. Brightness here is the highest of the fifty and the measured saturation is among the lowest, so the greens stay grey, the sky is an even overcast with one faint band of colour at the left, and no part of the canvas is asked to be spectacular. Even the impossible parts are painted quietly.

The strangest thing in that province is not in this frame. Somewhere in the same country stands a smooth white mountain that is not a mountain: it is a wrecked starship, with a dying creature of pure light still inside it, and the orcs who lived on this land took it for the house of their ancestors and built their entire religion around visiting it. Their shamans spent generations tending something none of them could have named. A landscape that treats floating islands as scenery is in the right province for that. Kept in our World of Warcraft collection with a talbuk grazing beneath the same valley's waterfalls and the broken world this province survives on, charted in antique gold.