Joker's Face in Thick Impressionist Brushstrokes — Print & Oil Painting

The shadows are not grey. Under the jaw the artist has used teal; along the temple, lilac; beside the nose, a warm coral; in the hollow of the cheek, an olive green. Nowhere in this face has a colour been darkened by adding black, and that decision is what separates the piece from every other treatment of the same head nearby.

The paint is applied in short loaded strokes roughly the width of a fingertip, laid side by side without blending, so that at reading distance the face assembles itself and at close range it comes apart into a mosaic. Ridges of pigment are visible along the forehead and the upper lip, and the brush has been dragged rather than dabbed in the hair.

The crop is uncomfortably tight. The frame cuts the forehead, both ears and the chin, leaving a face pressed up against the picture plane with no room around it. Two black wells hold the eyes, and the eyes inside them are looking up and off to the right at something outside the frame.

The mouth is the only unbroken passage: a wide band of scarlet swept from cheek to cheek across a small closed pair of lips, painted in three or four strokes and left alone. Around it the white greasepaint carries pink, cream and pale blue in equal measure.

The background survives only as vertical slabs of teal and burnt orange at the edges, and it is not describing anything. It sits in our DC Universe collection, alongside a smoothly finished portrait with a hand of cards and the same face buried under scratched mixed media.