Deadpool Crosses Guns Amid Dripping Red Paint — Print & Oil Painting

Close to half the surface is bare white and the artist uses it as space rather than as background. Red is thrown across it in fine spatter and fat blots, and a good number of those blots were still wet when the canvas was stood upright, so they have run downward in long thin trails, several of which reach the bottom edge. Nothing behind the figure is described at all.

He is folded up rather than standing. Seen from the front and slightly above, the knees are drawn high and apart, the forearms cross over the shins, and a pistol is held in each hand angled up and outward past the shoulders. It is a compact, closed shape, and the entire figure fits inside a rough triangle.

The suit has been painted wet into wet. Black runs into red along the flanks, the shoulders and the outsides of the thighs with no drawn edge anywhere between them, and the highlights along the knee plates and the gun barrels look scraped back rather than laid on. Two sword hilts rise past the shoulders, and a broad belt sits low across the hips with the round emblem set into the buckle in red, black and white.

This is the brightest and the most strongly contrasted canvas of the three in its family, and both readings come from the same decision, which was to leave the paper empty and stand a dark figure on it.

That emblem on the buckle used to be a button. For a long stretch of his comics he carried a teleporter built for him by the arms dealer who supplies most of his equipment, and it was triggered by pressing the logo at his waist, which put him behind whoever he was facing. He stopped using it for two reasons: it took the difficulty out of a fight, and it had begun removing muscles and pieces of bone from him at random every time it fired. Part of our Marvel collection, beside the same head drawn in pencil among flung red and the same guns held wide on a rooftop.