Sylvanas Windrunner's Lone Red Eye in Darkness — Print & Oil Painting

Roughly four fifths of this canvas is black and nothing at all happens in it. The measured brightness is the lowest of any painting in the group by a wide margin, the saturation reads as zero, and the artist has left the whole left side of the frame as an unbroken void with no gradient in it to reward looking.

She is pushed hard to the right and rendered in greys. A hood, the curve of a cheek, two winged plates at the shoulders, a pair of skulls with their jaws forward, and the outline of a bare waist: all of it is there, all of it is dim, and none of it is more than one step away from the dark it sits in.

One eye is red. It is a small hard point under the brow, the only chromatic mark on the entire canvas, and because everything else has been drained the eye reads as a light rather than as a colour. Cover it with a thumb and the picture stops working.

Her left arm reaches out to the left and disappears. The forearm is visible, the hand is not, and the artist has let the limb run into the black at exactly the point where the fingers would begin. It is the single most effective decision in the image.

She has tried to end it. In one of the quieter stories she climbs to the top of the fortress she helped bring down, walks to the edge and steps off, intending to land on the spikes below because they are the only thing capable of finishing her properly. She is caught before she arrives. Everything she does afterwards is done by somebody who asked for oblivion, was refused, and had to go back to work. A canvas that is four fifths darkness with one red point in it is not being minimal for its own sake. It belongs to our World of Warcraft collection, near the same face brought close with both eyes burning and the spire she climbed to the top of.