Tony Stark in Sunglasses Before His Iron Man Armor — Print & Oil Painting

Two figures occupy the same body of space and only one of them is alive. In front, a man in a charcoal suit and a dotted tie stands square to us, head slightly lowered, reaching up with his right hand to adjust a pair of glasses whose lenses are a flat unbroken red. Behind and above him the armour stands at rest, arms hanging, feet apart, filling the upper half of the canvas.

The drawing is comic book rather than photographic: firm contour lines, colour laid in flat with a little dry brushing over the top, shadow handled as areas rather than gradients. The suit of clothes is worked almost entirely in cool greys and blue blacks. The suit of armour is scarlet and gold with a broad gold faceplate and a white triangle at the sternum.

That armour has been painted as an object, not as a character. Its eye slits give off a weak glow, its shoulders are rounded and simplified, its hands hang open at the thighs, and its lower legs dissolve into haze so that it seems to be standing behind glass. It waits the way a mannequin waits.

The background is a single warm gradient, ochre at the top through amber to a smoky blue black at the floor, with two faint cold lights placed either side of the armour. Brightness is moderate and the strongest measured hue is orange, which turns the man in grey into a hole cut in a warm wall.

The composition depends on something this character settled the first time he was asked. He stood in front of a room of reporters, said he was Iron Man, and never took it back, which is why he is the one hero who can be shown standing in front of his own costume in business clothes without the picture becoming a secret. From our Marvel collection, alongside his bare face set above heavy poster lettering and the same unhelmeted head above a much later suit.