Batman Silhouetted in the Rain Amid Flying Bats — Print & Oil Painting

We are never shown a face. The figure stands with his back to us on a rooftop in the lower half of the frame, and the artist has resisted every temptation to turn the head even slightly. What we get instead is a shape: two short ears, a pair of shoulders, and a cape that spreads to the right into a broad scalloped wing occupying almost a third of the canvas.

Above and around him the sky is full of bats. There are more than forty of them, painted as flat dark marks with almost no interior detail, scattered across a wide range of sizes so that some read as close and some as distant. They cluster around a pale glow at the top of the frame and thin out towards the corners.

The whole picture sits in one colour, a wet olive-grey, laid in with a large brush and left rough. Rain falls as fine diagonal scratches over everything; a small white fork of lightning breaks on the left; two ruined verticals stand behind on the left like broken chimneys. Nothing has a hard edge except the bats.

The most economical passage is the bottom of the canvas, where a bank of pale mist simply erases the building the figure is standing on. He is left with no visible ground at all, which is a cheap trick and an extremely effective one.

It belongs to our DC Universe collection, beside the same swarm handled in grayscale and an ink wash version perched beneath a huge moon.