Triss Merigold's Fire Ring Amid the Storm — Print & Oil Painting

There are two kinds of weather in this canvas and they meet down the middle of it. The right third is water: grey-white spray, rain streaks slanting across everything, a churning pale mass with no drawing in it. The left third is fire. Neither is winning, and the figure is standing exactly on the join.

The fire has been organised into a loop, which is what lifts the piece above a straightforward effects painting. Her raised arm at the upper left trails flame, her lowered hand at the bottom centre trails more of it, and the two streams meet round the far side so that the whole left half is enclosed by a ring of burning gold. Inside the ring sits a dark pitted mass, a rock or something worse, and the fire never quite touches it.

The gown is emerald green, off the shoulder, with gold leaf-shaped plates at the shoulders and gold banding at the waist and cuffs, and it takes light from both directions at once: orange along the left side, cold blue-white along the right where the rain is. A gold headpiece with a blue stone sits in the red hair.

Her expression is the most interesting decision in the painting. Head turned three-quarters, eyes level, mouth closed, entirely unhurried. She is standing in the middle of a storm holding a wheel of fire open with both arms and looking mildly bored by it.

It sits in our The Witcher collection. The close portrait wreathed in the same flame is where that ribbon of fire comes from, at a distance where you can see her face properly.