Link Rests His Sword Before a Cloudy Castle — Print & Oil Painting

The castle behind is made of the same cloud it stands in. Towers, curtain walls and a broken bridge emerge from the bank at the upper left in grey-green, thin at the edges, dissolving where the light hits them, and it is impossible to say where the masonry ends and the weather begins. The artist never resolves it, which is the point.

The figure below is resolved completely. Standing on a low outcrop of pale rock with the feet apart, one hand on the pommel of a great sword whose point is set on the stone, the other lifted and open at the waist. The stance is a pause between two efforts rather than a heroic pose.

Armour and cloth are painted with a loaded brush and left unblended: a green tunic scumbled over with cream and olive, a fluted steel pauldron on the right shoulder, plate gauntlets, tall brown boots with buckles, and an enormous shield strapped across the back with a dark relief worked into its face.

The colour is deliberately narrow, greys and greens and dirty creams with no saturated note anywhere, and the tall format leaves a great deal of empty sky. It reads as a painting first and as a game character second. Part of our Zelda collection. The misty forest stance takes the same realist approach at ground level, and the dive through clouds with the Loftwing puts the sky to a different use.