Fi Floats Above a Rippling Pool of Light — Print & Oil Painting

Balance is the subject before anything else is. The figure is centred, upright and perfectly symmetrical, arms lifted a little from the body, the mantle spread wide to left and right in two stiff wings, and one pointed foot touching the water at the exact vertical axis of the canvas.

That touch is the only place where the picture admits a physical event. Four or five concentric rings spread outward from it across a shallow blue pool, and they are drawn with a much crisper edge than anything else in the painting, which makes the contact feel deliberate rather than accidental.

The colour scheme is unusually warm for this character. The sky behind is a wide sweep of cream, gold and pale turquoise, curving like a slow vortex around her head, and the two boulders flanking the pool are ochre and lilac. Against all that warmth her body reads cold: slate blue skin, a wine-red lining to the cloak, one gold chevron at the collar.

The pose is a dancer's, held rather than moving, and it suits a being who spends her existence waiting to be needed. Part of our Zelda collection. Fi above the kneeling swordsman sets the same figure in cold light, and the dive toward the green surface shows her in company.