Geralt on Horseback Approaches a Woman in Water — Print & Oil Painting

More than half of this canvas is standing water, and everything the picture does, it does through reflection. The flood is flat, shallow and absolutely still, so the trees, the burning light on the left and the reeds all appear twice, once solid and once smeared and broken into horizontal strokes.

A low warm source behind the trees at the left throws a broad road of gold straight down the water toward the viewer. It is the brightest thing in the painting and it splits the composition in half: everything left of it is amber and ochre, everything right of it is a cold green-black.

Standing in the middle of that gold, thigh-deep, is a pale slim figure with her back to us and her hair down. She is given no face, no costume and no clear edges, and she is not moving. The artist tells you nothing about her at all, which is the reason the picture is unsettling rather than merely pretty.

On the right bank, in the cold half, a dark horse stands still at the water's edge with a rider on its back: white hair, two hilts, one hand down on the rein. He has stopped. Behind him the silhouettes of a leaning watchtower and a stilt house rise against a teal sky, and dry reeds close the bottom of the frame.

Nothing happens in this painting and nothing is explained, and the whole tension sits in the width of water between two people who are both waiting. From our The Witcher collection. The candle-lit ruin with its violet mark is the other piece here built entirely out of a thing not yet decided.