Loki Channels Blue Magic From His Scepter — Print & Oil Painting

No canvas in this lot separates its lights from its darks more sharply, and the picture earns that honestly. The background is bare pale grey and near white, the figure is worked in blacks and deep greens, and there is almost nothing in between the two. The silhouette does nearly all of the drawing.

He stands turned to his left with the head lowered, and the face is kept almost entirely in shadow: one pale blue eye catches the light under the brow and nothing else of the features is given. The helm rises above it with two long horns curving up and back, drawn thin enough to read as sharp.

The robes are dark green and black, cut into ragged overlapping layers, with gold filigree scrolling across the chest, the shoulders and the hem in fine looping lines. A long torn cloak falls behind and breaks up into smoke at its lower edge, so there is no telling where the cloth stops.

Two cold events sit at opposite corners. His raised right hand at the upper right is engulfed in a burst of white and cyan with hard splintered edges, and at the lower left a staff carries a glowing blue crystal at its head. They are the only saturated colour in the canvas and the artist has placed them on the same diagonal.

Sorcery in these stories is a trained skill rather than an inheritance. He is not his brother's equal in a straight physical contest and never has been, so what he built instead was a working knowledge of magic deep enough to make him one of the more accomplished practitioners in his realm, which is a discipline that takes study rather than birth. A picture in which the only power visible is coming out of a hand and a staff is drawing the compensation rather than the gift. Part of our Marvel collection, beside the same staff carried low through green mist and a crouched fighting stance in torn green and brown.