Link Approaches a Vine-Covered Shrine in a Field — Print & Oil Painting

The proportions tell you what matters: the canvas is nearly twice as wide as it is tall, and the artist has given more than half of that width to dry grass. Barley-coloured stalks are painted in long upright strokes across the entire lower half, sharp and individual at the bottom edge, dissolving into a flat tan field by the middle distance.

The shrine sits alone in that field, a squat wedge of dark stone with a stepped entrance cut into its face, and thick ropes of vine have grown over both flanks in gold and olive. Nothing else has been built anywhere in view. Hills roll away behind it under a wide pale sky with one long band of pink cloud.

He is small, off to the left, standing in the grass with his back to us. A round shield hangs at his shoulder and a green sheath at his hip; he has stopped walking. The distance between him and the doorway is perhaps two hundred paces, and the composition holds him exactly there.

What the piece captures is the specific rhythm of the open-world games: you crest a rise, you see one small unexplained structure a long way off, and the afternoon changes shape. Part of our Zelda collection. The vine-covered Forest Temple shows the same overgrown masonry up close, and the sword driven into a glowing stump keeps the same trick of one bright object in an empty clearing.