Thanos Holds a Glowing Stone Between Two Moons — Print & Oil Painting

The support is textured paper and the medium sits on it dryly, so the tooth breaks every stroke and small flecks of bare white show through even the darkest passages. A small signature in violet is worked into the plating at the right of the picture, and the artist has left it there rather than hidden it.

The helmet has been drawn as sculpture. It rises to a point above the brow and runs back in ten or twelve raised vertical ribs painted in gold, cream and blue grey, with two flared side plates coming down past the ears. The face beneath is violet and heavily creased, the brows pulled down hard, and the eyes are cast toward the bottom of the frame rather than at us.

The hand fills the lower third. It is open and turned palm up with the fingers curling inward, plated in cream and gold, and about a hand's width above it a small white gold light burns in mid air with a fine spiral of vapour rising out of it. Nothing physically connects the two, and the artist has been careful to leave that gap.

The sky is black and densely starred, with a dark disc ringed in magenta at the upper left and a marbled blue sphere at the upper right. Blue leads with cyan second at low saturation, and this is the brightest of the six canvases in its family simply because so much of its surface is pale metal.

Collecting them was a separate story from using them. Before any glove existed the six were called Soul Gems, and five of them had been distributed among a group of extremely old collectors scattered across the universe. He went and took them one at a time, in a 1990 series built entirely around those six visits, some by argument and some by force, and only afterwards had them set into a single piece of gold. A picture with one stone alone above an open hand is a picture of that stage rather than the famous one. From our Marvel collection, beside all six set in the glove, on a throne of blades and the same glove raised in cold blue light.