Thanos in Thick Oil Brushstrokes on a Fiery Backdrop — Print & Oil Painting

This is a physical painting photographed rather than a file, and the paint is thick enough to read as relief. Strokes stand proud of the surface, each one laid down once with a loaded brush and never gone over, and where two colours meet they sit side by side without blending so that the join stays visible as a ridge.

The face is built out of colours that no skin has. Cobalt, lavender, teal, ultramarine and chalk white are placed in adjacent planes across the brow, the cheek and the great ridged chin, with strokes of raw violet dropped into the shadow under the jaw. The eyes are a pale green yellow and they are the only warm thing in the head, which is why they arrive first.

Behind him the ground is a flat field of vermilion and orange, scrubbed on around the silhouette and describing nothing whatever. Below the shoulder the armour goes deep blue violet with a hard black seam running through it, and at the lower left the gauntlet enters the frame in cream and gold with the fingers closed over something.

The measurement returns red first and blue second at about half saturation. Almost the entire canvas is those two hues meeting along one contour line, and the artist has resisted putting any third colour anywhere to soften the collision.

The colour of that face is the whole biography. He was born to a people who are not supposed to look like that, and an aberration in his genes gave him the size, the ridges and the skin at birth. His mother took one look at what she had produced and tried to kill him on the spot, and he settled the matter with her when he was twelve. A portrait that spends its entire attention on the surface of his head is looking directly at the thing that started everything else. Part of our Marvel collection, beside the same head in profile under a gold helmet and the gauntlet raised in cold blue light.