Link Approaches the Great Deku Tree at Dusk — Print & Oil Painting

Gold light floods in horizontally from behind the trunks and is the only reason anything in this painting has a shape. Everything nearer than that light is treated as a dark green or black cut-out: hanging boughs at the top, a tangle of roots and bracken across the bottom, whole trees reduced to two values.

The face is high up and to the right, worked into the bark of an enormous trunk without ever being drawn as a mask. Deep-set eyes under a heavy brow, a long nose, a mouth lost in beard-like fibres of wood; branches grow directly out of the temples. It takes a moment to find, and once found it cannot be unseen.

Down at the lower left, on a spit of ground beside a still pool, a single figure stands about as tall as a thumbnail. That is the whole of the human presence, and the entire scale of the painting depends on it.

Fireflies are painted as short curved streaks of white rather than as dots, so they leave trails, and there is a scatter of small green sparks through the canopy. The Great Deku Tree is the guardian spirit of the forest in Ocarina of Time, and this version leans hard on the guardian half. Part of our Zelda collection. The sunset silhouette makes the same approach at a colder hour, and the approach among green fireflies compresses it into a portrait format.