Geralt Crouches Beside a Sword in the Woods — Print & Oil Painting

One warm island in a wholly cold wood: that is the structure. The forest is mixed from blue-teal and grey, the mist between the trunks has no colour in it at all, and then in the right half of the frame sits a figure in tan leather and brass who has been lit from somewhere outside the picture by a fire nobody shows you.

The pose is the end of a working day rather than the middle of one. He is down on a low rock with one forearm slung over the raised knee, the other hand flat on his thigh, torso turned toward us, shoulders dropped. The elbow is doing all the weight-bearing. Nobody sits like that with anything left to do.

Down in the left third, a sword has been driven into the soil a few paces off, and lying beside it is something that used to be alive: a pale skull half in the leaf litter, a curve of rib, a dark heap that the paint declines to resolve. It is placed at the very edge of legibility and the picture offers no explanation for it.

The costume gets a full inventory. Studded leather over the thighs, a heavy buckled belt, mail sleeves, a quilted shoulder, spiked rings on the knuckles, and the wolf medallion hanging in gold at the centre of the chest as the single brightest object in the frame. The face is scarred, still, and looking straight out.

It belongs to our The Witcher collection. The ring of clawed creatures in a frozen wood shows what this same blue-grey forest looks like an hour earlier.