Thrall with Sarah Kerrigan — Print & Oil Painting

The sky has been split down the middle and given two different weathers. The left half is a cold blue-teal bank of cloud with a large pale shape half dissolved inside it; the right half is a hot orange, lit from behind, with two thin winged silhouettes crossing it. The seam between them runs almost exactly through the centre of the canvas and neither side gives way.

The orc stands on the ridge at the join. He is in a hood and a heavy cloak, green-skinned, with a cluster of red spheres set into the shoulder, and he carries a squared block of pale blue stone marked with a rune, held low and glowing enough to light his own forearm. His stance is planted and his face is turned slightly away.

Behind and above him rises the second figure, and everything about it belongs to another kind of picture. A mass of long segmented tendrils falls from the skull instead of hair, thin ribbed limbs curve up and over the shoulders like a cage, and the whole shape is back-lit so that it reads as outline first and body second. It is drawn with sharper, colder edges than anything on the orc.

The ground below is broken rock painted in cool greys with a few teal-green highlights, dropping away into cloud on both sides. The measured brightness is low and the picture holds its two temperatures apart at every level, in the sky, in the rock and in the two figures.

No meeting of this kind appears anywhere in the histories, and the pairing is entirely the artist's arrangement: the two characters come from different stories that never touch. What is recorded about the orc is smaller and worse. He was orphaned as an infant when his parents were killed on a road, was raised by the people who had beaten his race, and named the coastline he eventually settled after the father he could not remember. A picture that puts him under a divided sky with something enormous at his back is at least the right shape for that life. Part of our World of Warcraft collection, alongside the same orc cupping a small blue light in both hands and soldiers gathered before the walls of the city he founded on that coast.