Loki Crouches in a Fighting Stance With Daggers — Print & Oil Painting

The picture is half painting and half accident. Broad sweeping strokes of brown, olive and cream arc round the figure, and over the whole surface the artist has let fine lines of red, green and yellow run vertically down the canvas as drips, some travelling the full height. They pass across the face and the arms without respect for either.

He is crouched low with one knee down and the body turned toward us, the right arm reaching forward and down to the lower left, the left arm drawn back near the chest. Bare headed: short black hair, no helmet, and a gold vambrace closed around the left forearm over dark leather and olive cloth.

The expression is the whole picture. He is smiling straight at us, mouth closed, one eyebrow fractionally higher, entirely comfortable. Nothing in the face matches the urgency of the pose, and the gap between the two is deliberate.

What is in the forward hand is worth being honest about. The title names daggers, and the hand is closed around something, but the paint never resolves it: at that corner the artist has left a dark unread shape and moved on. No blade is legible anywhere in the image.

An unreadable weapon suits the job title. He began as the god of lies and spent decades being written as exactly that, until a run of comics in the 2010s promoted him to something stranger, a god of stories, on the argument that a lie told well enough stops being a lie and becomes a version of events. A crouching figure who is grinning rather than fighting, holding something the picture will not identify, is closer to that description. Part of our Marvel collection, alongside the same smirk delivered from a golden throne and the same coat carried in profile through green mist.