Yennefer Vengerberg Unleashing a Magic Blast — Print & Oil Painting

Everything in this picture radiates from one point below her hands. Long spears of pale acid light run outward from the bottom centre towards all four corners, and the lumps of rock torn up by the blast travel along exactly those lines, so the surface behaves like a diagram of an explosion caught a fraction of a second after it started.

She comes down into the top of that geometry. The body is pitched forward with the shoulders ahead of the hips, both arms driven straight down, the gloved fingers spread wide and aimed at the ground she is breaking. Nothing is resting on anything: the boots are clear of the rubble, and the black hair has been thrown up into a mass that fills the upper third of the canvas.

The scheme runs on two notes only. Green-white where the light is, smoked charcoal everywhere else, with the coat, the gloves, the trousers and the hair all mixed from the same near-black. A broad belt of stacked leather plates at the waist and one pale strand falling across her cheek are the only things breaking that dark up.

The face is the surprise. It is small in the frame, angled down at the work, and what is on it is concentration rather than fury: brows level, mouth closed, the eyes fixed on the point where the energy is leaving her. The sorceress of Vengerberg is written as one of the most powerful practitioners in these stories, and this reading makes that power look like effort.

It opens the run of Yennefer paintings in our The Witcher collection. The lightning she channels in a winter wood is the same discharge handled cold and blue instead of green.