Vesemir Poised With Blade Drawn — Print & Oil Painting

One clean straight line runs through this painting and it belongs to the sword. It rises out of a gloved fist at the lower right, passes the shoulder, and leaves the top of the canvas without bending, and it is the only object here that is not dented, pitted, scratched or worn. Everything else has had a hard life.

There is no setting whatsoever. A flat slate blue-grey ground with a faint halo of lighter tone around the head and shoulders, no wall, no landscape, no horizon. The figure is presented the way a device is presented on a shield, and the emptiness makes you read the armour as information rather than as scenery.

That armour rewards the reading. A battered brown pauldron studded with rivets and pitted right through in places, a short mail sleeve beneath it, a teal-blue gambeson under everything, a broad strap crossing the chest diagonally, a heavy square-studded gauntlet on the forearm, and a second hilt with a pale pommel showing behind the right shoulder. Nothing matches. Everything has been replaced separately over a long time.

The face is lit from above and slightly left. Dark hair going grey, pulled back with one strand fallen across the forehead, grey stubble, a nose that has been broken and reset, and eyes rimmed red and turned down and away from the viewer. He is looking at something below the frame line and thinking about it.

The word in the title is exact: this is poise, the state before the act, and the whole picture is arranged to hold that moment open. Shown in our The Witcher collection, and the same witcher over a winged beast in the reeds is what it looks like when the waiting stops.