Thanos Stands Calm Amid a Smoky Battlefield Sky — Print & Oil Painting

This is an oil sketch and it has been abandoned on purpose. Whole areas are a single dragged pass of a wide brush, the edges of the armour break up in a dozen places where the stroke simply ran out, and nothing anywhere on the canvas has been gone back over. It is the loosest handling in this group and the lowest saturation reading in it, and the two facts belong together.

Everything about the figure is at rest. He stands slightly right of centre facing us, the shoulders level, the head fractionally lowered, the mouth closed, and the eyes directed down and past us at something on the ground. There is no strain anywhere in the face and no weight shifted in the stance.

The armour is cream and dull gold blocked in with the flat of the brush, with the ridged helmet above it and a violet face between the two. Away to the right a large dark diagonal form crosses the frame at chest height and never resolves: it reads as an arm, or as a weapon, or as a shadow, and the picture declines to settle it.

The sky above is pale blue at the upper left, then brown grey smoke stacked across the middle in soft masses, and a dull red band runs along the lower right which may be ground and may be more smoke. Red leads the measurement with cyan second, which is that band and that sky and nothing else.

The quietest thing he ever did was raise a child. After another species had killed every other member of her people he took the survivor in, trained her for years, set her against a second orphan of his for practice, and built her into the most dangerous individual fighter in the galaxy. The comics are clear that he genuinely favoured her, and equally clear that she spent the rest of her published life trying to kill him. A calm face above a burning horizon is the right expression for that. Part of our Marvel collection, alongside the same face in thick violet strokes against fire and one of the crew that daughter ended up with.