Batman Standing Amid a Swirl of Bat Wings — Print & Oil Painting

Two curtains of wing close in from the left and the right, membranous, hooked and spread wide, and between them the picture leaves a narrow vertical corridor down the middle. The figure has been placed exactly in that gap. Nothing else in the composition is doing any work: the wings are the frame, the frame is the subject, and the man is what the frame contains.

He stands square to us with both fists closed at his sides and the weight even, so the pose is symmetrical and static and answers the shapes on either side of him rather than fighting them. The suit is a cold blue-grey with the emblem stamped black across the chest, a gold belt, black gauntlets ridged along the outside, and a cape that reads as another pair of the same wings.

Light comes from behind. A pale teal glow sits at the far end of the corridor at roughly waist height, throwing the wings into near-silhouette and putting a thin rim along both shoulders. The upper corners hold a suggestion of buildings and nothing more.

Surfaces are smooth and low in detail, and the whole image is built from about four values, which is why it holds together at small sizes better than most of the crowded pieces near it in the collection. From our DC Universe collection, beside a face coming apart into the same animals and a grayscale stream of bats.