Batman Perched on a Chimney Amid Starlit Rooftops — Print & Oil Painting

Roof tiles, laid in rows, drawn one by one across the right side of the frame and again in the lower left corner in a warm terracotta. This is not a skyline of towers and glass. It is a street of ordinary houses, and the figure crouching in the middle of it is sitting on somebody's brick chimney stack.

He has folded himself onto the top of it with both knees up and the arms tucked in, so the body has almost disappeared and what remains is a bell of cape hanging over the front of the brickwork, two pointed ears and a pale mask with no eyes drawn in it. He is roughly a quarter the height of the picture and no larger than the chimney he is on.

The sky is the widest passage. It is a deep clear blue-black with a scatter of small hard stars and one bright moon at the top left, and it has been left completely undisturbed except for the low band of smoke that rolls across the roofs at his waist and swallows everything behind him.

That smoke is what makes the picture work. It is painted as soft grey plumes with real volume, drifting from left to right, and it separates the sharp foreground roof from the sharp figure without letting either of them touch the other. Depth is created purely by an interruption.

The palette is three colours and no more: night blue, roof red, smoke grey. From our DC Universe collection, next to a parapet under a much bigger moon and a rainy rooftop with the same figure sitting still.