Batman Crouching on a Gargoyle Above Gotham — Print & Oil Painting

There are two creatures in this painting and only one of them is alive. Above and behind the crouching figure, leaning out of the stonework, a carved beast pushes its head into the frame: a blunt muzzle, a heavy brow, a wing folded back along the masonry, all of it catching the same weak light as the man below. The artist has given it the more interesting profile of the two.

The living one is in profile and almost entirely in shadow. He crouches on the ledge with the weight forward, one forearm on the knee, the cape falling in a single long curtain down the left side of the picture to the bottom edge. Nothing about the anatomy is drawn: it is modelled with a brush in dark blue-grey and only the ridge of the cowl, the line of the jaw and one shoulder are allowed to catch anything.

Down on the right, at the very bottom of the frame, the city is a bed of small gold lights with smoke drifting up through them. It is the only warm colour in the picture and it occupies perhaps a twentieth of the surface, which is exactly why it works.

Higher in the cloud, faint and easy to miss, a pale bat shape sits in a break in the weather. The artist has painted it as a lightening rather than as a projection, and left it ambiguous whether the sky is doing that or somebody is.

Value carries the whole design: three tones and no more, with the stone, the man and the sky separated by the narrowest possible margins. It belongs to our DC Universe collection, beside the same perch treated as sculpture and a gargoyle shared with Superman.