Geralt Draws a Glowing Blade Amid Flying Bats — Print & Oil Painting

Hair does the work of a diagonal here. It lifts off the shoulders and streams away to the right across a full third of the canvas, silver-white against black, and it is the only part of the image that suggests wind or speed at all.

The draw is caught halfway. The right arm is up and folded across the top of the frame, the hand closed on the grip above the shoulder, and the blade rises vertically past the face with a line of gold characters glowing along the fuller. The steel is picking up a cold rim of light down one edge and the runes are supplying a warm one down the other.

The finish is sculptural rather than painterly. Skin, mail and leather have all been modelled in the round and lit from a single hard source above and to the left, so that the cheekbones, the brow and the bridge of the nose come forward and the eye sockets fall back. It reads more like a figure photographed under studio lights than like brushwork.

The sky is almost empty: black-blue, a scatter of orange embers drifting up on the right, and a loose flight of small dark winged shapes in the upper corner, too far off to identify and clearly not meant to be. Below, a leather headband, a chainmail sleeve, quilted shoulders and the wolf medallion on its chain complete the costume.

Part of our The Witcher collection, and a direct companion to the portrait where the same engraved blade is held still, across his face in near-total darkness.