Batman's Silhouette Against a Pale Blue Haze — Print & Oil Painting

This is the brightest picture in the whole run and the figure in it is the darkest object in the whole run. The background is a high-key wash of white and pale ice blue, dragged vertically with a wide brush so that streaks of bare canvas run from the top edge to the bottom, and against that field the body sits as an almost flat blue-black shape.

Almost nothing is described. Two pointed ears, the curve of a cowl, a suggestion of a nose and a jaw, a shoulder line, and a mass below it that could be a cape or could be a coat. There is no emblem, no belt, no hand and no foot. Perhaps fifteen brushstrokes make the entire figure and several of them are the same stroke lengthened.

The edges are the interesting part. Down the left side the silhouette is hard and wet, cut cleanly against the white; down the right it feathers out and the blue bleeds into the ground so that the shoulder simply stops existing. The same figure is solid on one side and evaporating on the other.

Reversing the usual arrangement is the whole idea. Every other treatment of this character in the collection hides him in darkness; this one hides him in light, and the effect is colder rather than warmer. From our DC Universe collection, beside a smoky charcoal portrait built the same way and a bowed silhouette dissolving into red petals.