Yennefer Vengerberg Amid a Swarm of Crows — Print & Oil Painting

Count the birds before anything else. There are ten or eleven, scattered at every depth from a pair of specks above the far ridge to one whose wingtip crosses the top edge of the canvas at full size, and no two are set at the same angle. The eye is walked around the whole rectangle by them before it settles on the woman in the middle.

She stands in the shallows of a mountain lake, water at mid calf, drops still thrown up around her boots. This is the one fair-weather scene among these paintings: blue sky, real cloud, snow along the peaks, brown rock and green scrub on the far shore. The light is even and entirely unremarkable, which is what makes the rest of it strange.

The two hands are doing opposite jobs. The right is lifted open at shoulder height, fingers back, the nails long and dark, a few blue sparks drifting round them. The left hangs at hip level closed on a knot of blue-white energy that throws lightning off to the left in long forked lines. One hand is holding something; the other is asking for it.

The costume carries the sharpest drawing here. A black leather bodice zipped down the front, dark fur across the shoulders, gloves to the upper arm, a brown belt with loose straps hanging from it, a long cream panel of skirt split at the front, and then clusters of black feathers gathered at the thighs and above the boots.

Nothing in the image explains the birds, and it is better for that. The feathers on her legs and the crows in the air are the same black, the same edge, the same weight of stroke, and that is the whole of the argument being made. From our The Witcher collection, and the portrait with a single raven on her hand makes the point with one bird instead of eleven.