Joker Smoking in the Rain Under City Lights — Print & Oil Painting

The lights behind him are all out of focus and there are more than thirty of them. Yellow, tangerine, magenta, teal and white, painted as soft discs at four or five different sizes, stacked up the right side of the frame and scattered across the left, they turn the entire background into a bed of glowing circles with no building anywhere in it.

Over that, rain falls as long fine diagonal lines, and over that again the whole picture has been drawn in scratched hatching. Every surface, the coat, the skin, the hair, the collar, is built from hundreds of short parallel strokes in contrasting hues, so a red sleeve turns out to contain violet, orange and black lines sitting side by side.

The gesture at the centre is small and completely still. He has brought one hand up to his mouth with a cigarette held between the first two fingers, thumb tucked in, and closed his eyes to draw on it. The shoulders are dropped. Nothing else in the body is doing anything.

The costume is the loudest thing in the frame and he is ignoring it: a scarlet jacket, a mustard waistcoat with a single button drawn, a teal shirt underneath, and green hair pushed back off a white-painted face with red brows and two blue-green lozenges below the eyes.

A portrait of the character with his eyes shut and his hands occupied is an unusual choice, and it is why this one stays with you. Part of our DC Universe collection, next to the same face painted calm and eyes closed and a hard close crop of the same makeup.