LeChuck Holding a Voodoo Doll at Night — Print & Oil Painting

Chunky faceted strokes, laid down wet and then left alone: the whole surface is built from flat planes of blue, cream and rust with hardly a blended edge in it. This is a famous box cover repainted in a much looser hand, and the looseness is what makes it worth hanging.

The composition is a tower. LeChuck fills the middle from the waist up, a green corpse in a rotting red coat under a broad hat with the skull and bones stitched across the crown, his beard a solid black wedge that swallows half his chest. A pin is held up in one hand at eye level. In the other, out at arm's length, dangles a small blond figure with three skull-headed pins already through its head and both arms raised in protest.

Below him, at the rail, stand the two people this concerns. Elaine in a red bandana and white blouse with her hands at her mouth, Guybrush beside her in a white shirt and a wide-buckled belt with his mouth open and his arms flung wide. Neither of them can reach him, which is the joke and the horror at the same time.

Behind the group the ship is given entirely as rigging: shrouds, ratlines, a mast, blocks and deadeyes crossing a night sky in dark blue lines, with a full moon sitting just behind the hat and white stars flicked across the rest. A monkey hangs off the shrouds at the left. Part of our Monkey island collection, and a freshly painted answer to the original cover it is quoting. For the same threat delivered quietly, see the close study of the doll and the pin.