Geralt Surrounded by Clawed Dark Creatures — Print & Oil Painting

Bodies close the ring on every side of this canvas. There are creatures at the left edge, the right edge and the bottom edge, all turned inward, plus five or six more heads receding into the mist behind. Wherever you enter the picture you are looking over a shoulder that is not yours.

They have been given a consistent anatomy, which is what makes them convincing. Grey-blue skin stretched over a heavy ribcage, bald elongated skulls, long pointed ears set low, small dark eyes and no visible nose. The two in the foreground are enormous and seen from behind, so their spines and shoulder blades do most of the framing.

Then there is the pink. The webbing between their fingers and the insides of their hooked claws have been painted a hot magenta, and that colour appears at eight or nine points around the frame and nowhere else on the canvas. It works exactly like warning colouration on a real animal: your eye finds every hand in the picture before it finds anything else.

He stands dead centre, feet apart, the silver sword held low and angled across his body, mouth open, yellow eyes wide. He is the smallest figure in his own painting. Bare trees arch overhead, ice particles hang in the air, and the whole thing sits in a single band of teal and blue-grey.

Silver is the metal that answers this sort of thing, and the blade in his hand is the pale one rather than the steel. Shown in our The Witcher collection, near the misty forest fight against two wolf-bodied beasts, where he is outnumbered by considerably less.