Joker's Face Close-Up Amid Blood Splatter — Print & Oil Painting

The eyebrows are painted on, and the paint is running. Two thick red arcs sit high on the forehead where real brows would not be, and from the underside of each one three or four drips have started down the skin and stopped partway, which means this makeup was applied wet and has been worn for some hours since.

Very little room has been left around it. The face fills the frame from the hairline to just below the chin, with only a narrow strip of background on either side, so there is no neck, no shoulder and no costume to tell us anything. Under each eye sits a blue-green triangle, point down; the nose is a small red ball; the mouth is a wide painted smile in the same red, drawn over lips that are only half following it.

Behind the white paint the face is not smiling. The eyes are level, slightly hooded, and looking straight out with no crinkle at the corners at all, and the artist has kept them the most naturalistically painted thing in the picture. Green hair, damp and separated into strands, falls in front of both ears.

The ground is a flat warm gold with a faint vertical grain, and across it somebody has flung dark red: a broad spatter on the left, a heavier cluster on the right with two long runs descending from it. None of it touches the face. It is behind him, which is worse.

Two colours carry the whole image, the red and the gold, with the blue triangles as the only cool relief. From our DC Universe collection, beside the same makeup painted with the eyes closed and a version of it smoking in the rain.