Link Surveys Hyrule From a Sunlit Cliff — Print & Oil Painting

The sun does all the work in this one. It sits just above the horizon slightly right of centre, burning a hole through a bank of cumulus, and everything between it and us is either silhouette or haze. The cloud edges go white-gold, the undersides go apricot, and the sky at the top of the canvas holds on to a hard clean blue.

The country underneath is laid out in four or five receding blues, the way distance actually behaves. You can pick out a walled town catching pink light in the middle distance, broken towers on the plain, a lake, and at the right a single peak with a column of smoke standing straight up from it into the cloud. A crescent moon is still up at the upper left.

The figure is small, dead centre, and turned entirely away. He stands on a bare grey rock with a sword and a round shield slung on his back, one arm loose, and the glare behind him reduces him to a dark shape with a thin warm rim along the shoulder and calf.

The foreground is the surprise: sharp grass, clover and small white flowers painted crisply along the bottom edge, so the eye starts in something close enough to touch and then travels forty miles. Part of our Zelda collection, next to the green fields beneath a smoking volcano and the castle seen past leaning stone spires.