Batman's Face in Purple Rain Before a Courthouse — Print & Oil Painting

One hue runs this picture end to end. Violet fills the sky, the stone, the armour and the shadows; magenta lifts the edges where light lands; a colder blue-purple sits in the recesses. There is no green, no yellow and no true black anywhere in the frame, and the discipline of that is what gives the image its strange, lit-from-inside quality.

The head fills the middle of the canvas and is turned straight at us. The cowl is drawn with hard angular planes, the two ears rising off the top of the frame, and the eyes are blank white lozenges with no pupil in them. Below the mask the jaw, mouth and chin are exposed and modelled carefully: a heavy lower lip, a set mouth, a shadow under the cheekbone.

Behind him stands a public building. A pediment, a moulded cornice, and a row of square pilasters, all rendered flat and pale, with a few carved capitals surviving in the frieze under the cornice: a W, then a T, and then nothing legible. The rest of the inscription has been left as suggestion.

Rain falls as long pale vertical lines drawn straight down the whole surface, over the building and the figure alike, at a regular spacing that reads more like a screen than like weather. The armoured shoulders below the collar are broad, plated and cropped by the bottom edge.

Everything is drawn cleanly and digitally, with sharp planar shading and no visible texture, closer to poster art than to a study. It belongs to our DC Universe collection, beside a neon-green treatment of the same city and a skyline lit by lightning.