Rocket Raccoon Painted in Blue and Purple Brushstrokes — Print & Oil Painting

The weave of the canvas comes up through the paint everywhere, and that is deliberate. Marks are laid on in wide slabs with a flat brush, dragged once and then abandoned, so the weave chews the edge of every mark. Nothing on this square canvas has been gone over twice.

The head is turned slightly to our left and the mouth is set in a flat, closed, thoroughly unimpressed line. The muzzle and brow are built from cool greys and chalk white, the mask markings around the eyes are stated in two or three black strokes, and the near eye is a small warm brown disc with one white catchlight in it. The far eye is darker and reads as an accident of shadow.

The colour choices are frankly arbitrary and they work. Hot orange and vermilion run through both ears, along the cheek fur and down the neck, colours no animal has, sitting inside a background of navy, violet and magenta blocks with a few turquoise dabs in the upper left. Blue leads the measurement with cyan behind it at about half saturation.

Below the chin the picture gives up on description. Dark blue grey shapes suggest a collar, a strap and the top of a shoulder, and the artist has stopped there rather than paint a costume.

A portrait assembled out of marks that do not belong to the subject suits this particular figure. He arrived in 1976 as a minor curiosity in the back pages of a black and white anthology, put together by a writer who took the name straight from a Beatles song about a raccoon, and spent decades as a footnote before anyone built a career on him. He was improvised too. From our Marvel collection, alongside the same head laughing, flying through snow on a strapped on rocket and a patient coloured pencil study on black.