Geralt Raises His Sword With a Burning Fist — Print & Oil Painting

This is an interior, and the architecture matters. Heavy timber beams cross both upper corners, plank walls run away behind him, and cold blue daylight is getting in through the gaps between the boards in hard parallel shafts. Everything on the left is smoke.

The two hands are doing entirely different jobs and the composition is built on the difference. The right one is up at shoulder height, closed on the hilt of the sword being pulled from the scabbard behind him, the pommel and part of the blade already clear. The left one hangs low at the hip and is on fire, orange flame licking up between the fingers and off the back of the knuckles.

Sparks stream away to the right in a long horizontal drift, and there is a second warm glow low on the right edge where something is already alight. Against all that, the smoke rolling in from the left is a pale grey-blue, and the two temperatures meet down the centre of his chest.

The armour is the studded and buckled kind: black plates over the shoulders and abdomen, a broad guard on the upper arm, red-brown straps crossing twice over the sternum, a long knife at the belt, and the wolf medallion sitting where the straps intersect. The brow is low, the yellow eyes are level, and the mouth is a flat line.

What gives the image its edge is the setting. He is holding an open flame at waist height inside a dry timber building, which is either very confident or the beginning of a much larger fire. Part of our The Witcher collection, and the green-lit profile with the same sign in his palm handles it as a quiet, controlled thing instead.