Guybrush Diving for a Golden Monkey Idol — Print & Oil Painting

Follow the rope. It comes out of the lower left knotted round the neck of a golden idol, runs up in one long slack curve through the middle of the picture, and finishes tied to the ankle of the man swimming down towards it. Once the rope has been seen, the arrangement stops being a dive and becomes a problem.

He is head down and reaching, both arms out, hair standing off the scalp, a string of bubbles leaving a wide open mouth. The shirt balloons around the ribs, the trousers pull tight at the knee, and the drawing catches the specific ungainliness of a person moving underwater rather than the elegance of a swimmer.

The idol is a monkey head in gold, larger than his own, with a rope collar round it and one flat empty eye. It rests on the seabed beside a starfish at the foot of a jetty whose black piles march away into the murk. Further back a skeleton has settled next to an anchor, arms loose, going nowhere in particular.

Light comes down from a surface worked as a broken silver ceiling and throws long refraction patterns across the piles and the sand. Everything above is bright blue, everything below turns green and grey, and the gold of the idol is the only warm colour anywhere. In this story a single lungful lasts a comfortable ten minutes, which is the kind of joke a scene like this depends on. Part of our Monkey island collection, and the skull that presides over the whole business is on the painted cover. For the same man afloat rather than sinking, see the coffin.