Adult and Child Link Beside a Sheik Carving — Print & Oil Painting

The same person at two ages, one step apart. The tall one leads with his left shoulder: green tunic over white leggings, brown boots, the shield with its blue face and gold triangle riding at his hip, the sword hilt wrapped in blue over his shoulder. In his raised right fist he holds a small blue ocarina, lifted rather than played.

The small one keeps pace at his right, half his height, in exactly the same green, and he is playing: both hands cupped around a blue ocarina, cheeks lifted, eyes wide open. The doubling is the whole idea, and the two costumes have been kept identical down to the belt buckles so that nothing distracts from it.

Behind them a tall panel of pale stone carries a relief drawn in fine grey line, a crowned figure with long hair and closed eyes, both hands cupped at the mouth in precisely the gesture the child is making. The carving is rendered far lighter than the two figures and half faded into the stone, so it reads as a memory rather than as sculpture.

Colour splits down the middle: warm sunlit green on the left, cool grey-lavender on the right where the stone stands, with a white-blue fairy trailing sparks in the upper corner and green foliage crowding in along the bottom. Part of our Zelda collection. Young Link playing his ocarina in a forest sunbeam takes the same instrument and the same child out into open light.