Batgirl Standing Beneath the Bat-Signal — Print & Oil Painting

The camera has been put on the floor. Everything in the frame is seen from below the waist of the figure standing in it, so the hips read wider than the shoulders, the chin is tipped away from us, and the sky behind occupies the entire top third with nothing in it but weather. It is the viewpoint of somebody who has just been knocked down.

High in that sky, small and soft-edged, a bat is projected onto low cloud. The artist has painted the beam rather than the lamp: a pale cone of light widening upward through the haze, its shape only just holding together by the time it reaches the top of the canvas. Nothing else up there is described at all.

Against that grey-green the hair is the loudest event in the picture. It is a hard scarlet, blown out to the left in long separated ribbons that curl at the tips, and it takes up almost as much canvas as the body does. The suit underneath is deliberately quiet by comparison: slate grey with black panelling, a black cape lined in old gold, gold gauntlets and boots, a gold plated belt sitting low, and a small gold bat at the throat.

The rendering is airbrushed to a high finish, with reflected light worked into every curve of the material and the seams drawn as fine dark lines. In the lowered left hand, half hidden against the cape, sits a folded batarang, painted small and dull so that it registers late.

The signal is not a summons to her. It is Gordon calling the other one, and the picture is composed so that she is standing under somebody else's message. Part of our DC Universe collection, alongside the spray-painted pop art version of the same character and Batman in the rain before a glowing Bat-Signal.