Geralt Walks a Valley Toward a Hilltop Castle — Print & Oil Painting

The device is an old one and it is used properly here: a single figure seen from behind, placed small and off-centre low in a wide landscape, looking at exactly the view we are looking at. You are not watching him. You are standing slightly behind him and sharing the problem.

The brightest object in the painting is a cloud. A salmon and apricot bank sits just above the ridgeline in the right half of the canvas, catching the last of the light, and every other value in the picture has been set relative to it. The sky above cools quickly into blue-grey; the sky below it is pale and empty.

The land arrives in flat overlapping planes, four or five of them, running from a near-black slope in the left foreground through violet and dusty rose into the palest blue at the far right. There is no texture in any of them. They are cut shapes, and the depth comes entirely from how much air the artist has put between each pair.

The castle is a cluster of thin spires on a spur at the upper left, wholly in silhouette, and it is noticeably smaller than the cloud. The figure at the lower right has two hilts above his shoulders, a pale topknot and a dark cloak, and stands on a track that runs away into the middle of the valley. The distance between the two is the subject.

Part of our The Witcher collection. The lake and green hills is the same walk on a day when the weather has cleared completely.