Geralt Casts a Fire Sign in the Shadows — Print & Oil Painting

Two light sources argue across this canvas and neither wins. On the left, at chest height, a fist of yellow-white fire; behind and around it, a sick green glow soaking into the wall and the smoke. Between them the figure is lit from two directions at once, warm along the front of the face, cold green along the jaw and the back of the head.

The casting hand is only half in frame, cropped by the left edge, fingers curled upward with the flame already sitting in the palm. Pale green smoke boils off it and drifts up through the top left corner. The artist has not drawn a gesture that produces fire; the fire is simply there, which is closer to how the signs are described than any amount of theatrical hand-waving would be.

The head is in strict profile, which is rare in this collection and does a great deal of work. Hair swept back off the forehead and tied at the nape, a short grey beard, and a raw red wound running vertically through the brow so that the eye beneath it reads as a red slot rather than a shape. He is looking at his own hand.

The armour is heavy, dark and industrial: overlapping black plates across the chest and abdomen, a rope of orange cord looped over the shoulder and again round the waist, and two hilts crossing behind the right shoulder with a warm point of light glinting off one of them. Nothing is decorative.

Of the handful of signs a witcher is taught, this is the least subtle and the most useful, and the picture treats it as an ordinary tool rather than as a spell. Part of our The Witcher collection. The same fire thrown inside a timber building makes an interesting comparison, because there it is a considerably worse idea.