Geralt Kneels Before a Leshen in the Woods — Print & Oil Painting

What holds this picture together is the empty space in the middle of it. The two figures sit at opposite thirds of a wide frame and between them there is nothing at all: a flat mossy shelf of rock, a low bank of fog, and a gap of perhaps twenty paces that neither of them has crossed.

On the left, down on one knee among the roots, with the sword driven point-first into the earth in front of him. The blade stands up as a bright vertical bar directly between the man and the thing he is looking at, and it is doing the work of a boundary line as much as a weapon.

On the right, in the trees, the antlers arrive before the body does. A great branching rack spreads across the top right quarter of the canvas, and beneath it a pale skull-face and a narrow dark trunk of a body wrapped in something like bark. Crows break out of the branches overhead and scatter across the mist.

The lighting decides who has the advantage. A warm ochre haze comes through the wood from behind the antlered figure, so it stands backlit and edged in gold while the kneeling man is left in cool shadow with nothing behind him. The strongest light in the picture belongs to the monster.

A leshen is an old forest spirit that wears a deer skull, commands the crows and the wolves, and is bound to the wood it grew out of, which is why killing one is a decision rather than a formality. From our The Witcher collection. A witcher facing a leshen in the swamp takes the same encounter into standing water.