Zul'jin Crouched Before an Ancient Stone Gate — Print & Oil Painting

A line of small fires runs into the picture and takes the eye with it. Eight or nine torch flames are set along both sides of a paved causeway, evenly spaced, getting smaller as they go, and they lead from the bottom edge of the frame straight back to a stone arch standing at the centre of the middle distance. It is the oldest trick in landscape painting and it is used here without embarrassment.

The arch itself is lit from behind in a cold blue-white, so the opening is a slab of pale light with nothing legible in it, and the pillars flanking the causeway are silhouetted against the same glow. The colour reading on this canvas is among the highest in the whole lot, and nearly all of it belongs to that one blue.

He is at the far left, crouched low on a great exposed root with one knee up and a two-bladed axe held loose in the right fist. He is small in the frame, unlit except along one edge, and turned toward the gate rather than toward us. The picture is a landscape that happens to contain him.

The right side answers with the only warmth: a squat stone block carved with a face, a brazier burning orange on top of it, and behind it the dark mass of a tree. Between the cold gate and the hot brazier the whole middle of the canvas stays in deep blue-green shadow.

What is left of that empire is architecture. The forest tribes once held territory across most of the continent, with cities, roads and a priesthood, and by the time these paintings are set they hold one walled compound in the woods with a warlord in it and a great many ruins outside. A picture that gives the stonework the centre of the frame, lights it properly, and puts the last of its chieftains crouching in the dark at the edge has the proportions exactly right. Part of our World of Warcraft collection, beside the same warlord dodging a blazing blade in these woods and the same warlord painted whole, with both eyes and both arms.