Troll Brewing a Glowing Green Poison — Print & Oil Painting

The green is the only lit thing in the picture and it is coming out of a cooking pot. A squat iron cauldron sits at the bottom right, filled to the rim with a viscous acid-green liquid that runs down the outside in three thick tongues, and the light it throws upward catches the underside of the blade held over it, the knuckles of the hand holding that blade, and nothing else.

The dagger is being dipped rather than stirred. It is laid flat across the mouth of the pot at a shallow angle, a long single-edged blade with a copper-wrapped grip and a red bead set into the pommel, and the green has already taken along the last third of the edge. The gesture is patient and unhurried and it is the entire action of the painting.

Above it the troll fills the upper half of the frame. Blue-grey skin, small red eyes under a low brow, a mane of green hair standing up in a stiff crest, two ivory tusks curving up past the cheeks, and a violet tongue hanging out of the open mouth. The armour is heavy and ornate: violet-grey plate at both shoulders set with pale round stones, a spiked gorget, an articulated bracer on the working arm.

The setting is barely there. A pale tan haze fills the background with one carved obelisk standing at the right, lit from within by the same green, and a small shrub at its foot. The measured saturation is low and the picture holds almost all of its colour in two places: the brew and the hair.

Wounds are not a lasting argument with his people. Trolls regrow what they lose, limbs included, given time and the right attention, which is a fact their neighbours find harder to live with than any weapon they carry, and it goes a long way toward explaining why the trade in this painting exists at all. Something that keeps working after the cut has closed is worth more than a sharper knife. Part of our World of Warcraft collection, alongside a warlord of the same people with his tusks wrapped in violet cloth and another specialist of this world working a room from above.