Batman Silhouette Amid Falling Red Petals — Print & Oil Painting

The petals are the whole event. They come across the lower half of the canvas from the right in a long drifting cloud, hundreds of small red and crimson marks at every angle, thickening where they pass the body and thinning to single specks at the left edge, with one fuller flower painted at the bottom centre. Nothing else in the picture is that colour and nothing else is moving.

The figure is barely a figure. Seen in profile from the chest up, head bowed and turned away, it consists of a curved cowl with one long ear, a shadowed jaw, a shoulder and a mass of drapery that dissolves downward into the petal storm without ever resolving into cloth. There is no emblem, no belt, no gauntlet and no eye.

Behind the head sits a soft field of cyan, brushed on wet and left to bleed at the edges, and it is the only cool light in the painting. It works exactly like the gold ground behind a saint in an altarpiece: it does not describe a place, it simply puts a colour behind a head.

Everything is loose, laid in with a broad soft brush and almost no drawn line anywhere, so the whole surface has the quality of something remembered rather than observed. At small sizes it reads as a mood; up close it comes apart into strokes.

It belongs to our DC Universe collection, and stands beside a silhouette dissolved into pale blue instead of red and a smoky charcoal portrait of the same head.