Loki Gazes Sideways Amid Green and Crimson Strokes — Print & Oil Painting

The paint is laid on in broad flat slabs and left alone. Every plane of the face is a separate stroke of a loaded brush, the transitions between them are edges rather than blends, and the same handling continues out into the background so that figure and ground are made of identical marks at identical size.

He faces three quarters right with the chin slightly lifted and the eyes travelling further right still, so that he is looking at something well outside the frame and not troubled by it. The mouth is closed with one corner marginally higher than the other. It is the most self possessed expression in this group of pictures.

The helm is gold with two long horns rising from the temples and curving back, its brow plate cut into angular facets and its cheek pieces coming down past the jaw. Below it a green coat with a wide standing collar, opened over something dark, is described in perhaps a dozen strokes.

Behind him the background is a mosaic: sage, olive and cream through the centre with blocks of crimson and rust pushed in at the left and right edges. Red leads the measurement with orange second, which is entirely those two corners, since almost nothing on the figure is warm.

The composure is the interesting part, given the biography. He is not related to the family he was raised in: he was found as an infant in a frost giant stronghold after his father had been killed in single combat, kept hidden by that father because he had been born small, and taken home and brought up alongside the son of the man who did the killing. Odin never gave him the family name either. From our Marvel collection, next to the same profile with a serpent wound through the horns and the same helmet worked in olive coloured pencil.