Batman's Face Dissolving into a Swarm of Bats — Print & Oil Painting

A vertical line runs down the middle of the face and the two sides obey different rules. To the left of it: a cowl, an eye, a cheekbone and a mouth, modelled in three dimensions with the surface of the mask catching a warm highlight along the brow. To the right of it: nothing solid at all, only bats, dozens of them, spilling outward and upward into the sky in a widening cloud.

The transition is handled by size. Nearest the face the bats are large and their outlines are crisp; further out they shrink and multiply until the furthest are single dark commas against the cloud. Because the change is gradual, the eye reads it as a dissolve rather than as a collage.

Everything sits in two colours. The sky is burnt orange going to deep umber in the corners, worked into heavy horizontal cloud bands, and every solid object is black. There is no third hue anywhere in the frame, not in the skin, not in the eye, not in the smoke.

Along the bottom edge, laid flat and centred like a maker's mark, sits the emblem: a wide angular bat set inside a lighter panel with its wings clipped by the frame. It has been placed as a piece of typography rather than as part of the scene, which turns the whole image into a poster.

The face itself is photographic in origin, with the moulded seams of a real prop cowl visible around the nose and the brow. Part of our DC Universe collection, alongside the same idea handled in grayscale and a figure framed by two curtains of wing.