Geralt Rides Toward a Misty Spire and Portal — Print & Oil Painting

The construction here is photographic rather than painted: a real sky, real grass texture and real cloud have been assembled around a drawn citadel in the way matte paintings are put together, and the seams have been buried under mist and low sun. It gives the piece a documentary flatness that none of the brushwork in this group has.

The citadel climbs. Terraced walls and roofs step up a conical hill through three or four stages to a single tall spire at the top, gold light striking its left flank while the right stays blue, and a bank of mist has settled all the way round its base so that the whole thing appears to be floating on a shelf of cloud.

Then, at the foot of the hill and dead centre, there is a small turquoise glow with a shaft of pale light rising out of it. It is the coldest note in a canvas made almost entirely of gold, grey and green, it is by far the smallest object given any saturation, and consequently it is the first thing the eye finds and the last thing it lets go of.

The sky takes the top two thirds. A warm break on the left with the sun buried in cloud, rolls of cumulus catching pink and cream across the upper right, and a loose flight of birds crossing the middle distance to give the citadel its scale.

The rider is in the lower left corner on a pale horse, on a green slope with a track curving away beneath him, and he is roughly the size of one of the citadel's windows. Part of our The Witcher collection, and the silhouetted ride toward a sunset castle spire is the same journey handled with shapes instead of photographs.