Thor Charges Forward as Mjolnir Crackles With Lightning — Print & Oil Painting

Roughly two thirds of this canvas is smoke, and the brightness reading falls accordingly, among the lowest anywhere in the lot. The ground behind him is an even grey black volume with soft drifting particles in it and no floor, no wall and no horizon, so the figure has nothing to be standing on and nothing to be walking toward.

He is striding through it at a slight angle to us, weight forward, the right fist closed and drawn back at the hip. The armour is silver grey scale at the sleeves over a dark cuirass carrying six round silver bosses, with a wide belt and dark boots below. Both eyes are lit flat white and the face is otherwise unremarkable, which is the point of it.

The red cape is the only warm thing in the picture and it has been given a third of the width. It streams off his shoulders and out to the right in one long uninterrupted sweep, painted in three values with the trailing edge dissolving into the smoke rather than ending.

His left hand carries the hammer low and loose, and out of it a mass of cyan white lightning branches across the entire left of the canvas, forking up and back in long thin arcs that reach almost to the top corner. Nothing else in the picture is lit at all.

Carrying it loosely is correct, because losing it is not possible. The enchantment on that hammer sends it back to whoever threw it, over any distance and through almost anything in the way, which is why the fastest way for him to travel is to throw it as hard as he can and hold on to the loop of the strap. He is not gripping it here so much as keeping hold of the handle. From our Marvel collection, alongside the same hammer hanging quietly by its strap in a misty field and a roar with the current running through both open hands.