Geralt Stands Before a Giant Wolf Medallion — Print & Oil Painting

Two colours, and that is the entire scheme: a pale ice-white ground and a single dark red. No third note is admitted anywhere, which makes this the brightest and the most graphic piece in the group, closer to a printed poster than to a painting.

The emblem takes the left two thirds. A snarling wolf head built from angular flat shapes with white gaps left between them, its teeth reduced to triangles, its brow to three wedges. The red is broken and patchy across its surface, as though it had been stencilled through a plate that was already worn out, and two long diagonal streaks run behind it into the corners.

The figure has been pushed right out to the margin. He stands at the right edge in near-black, white hair falling forward, one eye catching a red spark, and the coat or cloak below him dissolves into ragged horizontal strokes that trail back across the bottom of the frame. His sword reaches out horizontally into the emblem's territory, and that line is the only thing tying the two halves of the design together.

That wolf head is not decoration. It is the badge of the school he was trained by, worn in miniature on a chain by everyone who survived the same training, and the painting has simply enlarged it until the man is standing inside his own credentials. Part of our The Witcher collection, and the hooded portrait where the medallion is the brightest object on the canvas shows it back at its usual size.