Blood Minister Haunting — Print & Oil Painting

Everything here is made of lines. The sky is a mass of curling hatch marks, each bare branch is one tapering stroke, and the tone in the cloak is built entirely from parallel strokes laid closer or further apart. It has the look of a woodcut or a screen print, worked in three colours and no more: navy, pale blue and a hard crimson.

In the middle of that a bearded man in a heavy red cloak has come down onto his knees among the graves, head thrown back and mouth wide open. Whether it is a scream or a laugh is left completely undecided, and the drawing offers no help either way.

The setting is a Yharnam churchyard at its most theatrical: leaning headstones, iron railings, bare trees clawing in from both edges, a row of lit street lamps in the middle distance and a cathedral spire rising into the swirling sky on the right.

At the lower left a second figure lies where it fell, pale-haired and still, close enough to the kneeling man to be his doing or his loss. From our Bloodborne collection, alongside the hunter swinging a burning weapon, another figure caught in the middle of the night's work.