Elaine Marley Facing a Skeleton with a Torch — Print & Oil Painting

Chips of bone are still in the air. A dozen pale fragments fly up and out of the top of a great skull, trailing green vapour, and the torch that did it has not yet finished its arc. This is one frozen instant, staged so that the impact sits in the upper left and the person responsible for it in the right.

She has both hands on the shaft, one high and one low, elbows in, weight forward, teeth bared. Nothing about the pose is decorative: it is the follow-through of a real swing, and the flame streams back off the head of the torch in a long yellow tongue.

The costume is precise. A purple scarf tied over the hair, gold hoops, a soft white shirt full at the elbow, a purple waistcoat laced up the front, a purple sash, and a curved sabre still hanging in its belt at her hip. She had a sword available and chose the fire.

Everything around is jungle at low light: palm fronds and broad leaves in flat teal and olive, vines crossing, no sky visible anywhere. A faint green glow sits in the skull's eye socket. The scheme is purple against green almost throughout, which leaves the flame as the only warm thing in the frame. It belongs to our Monkey island collection, next to the calm night portrait of the same woman and the coffin out on the swamp.