Friday, February 3, 2017

Flowering Nose Day 2017 Batman SNOW 196, page 10

I am late posting this.  On January 30th (Monday) I was up at the abbey where Seth is buried.  It is quiet, clear, and chilly there in the wintertime.  I didn't have a camera with me, so I don't have any photos from that visit, but I suspect that whatever readers visit this blog would rather see his work than his grave anyway.


BATMAN SNOW issue 196 page 10
So I thought it might be nice to post a page of his work that I hadn't posted before.

It is, of course, one of the more thrilling pages in his whole oeuvre.  All the lines in the page are angular, diagonal, showing fast, brittle movement, like ice cracking.  Even the space between the two panels makes them look as though they have been broken apart.

Batman's legs and Mr. Freeze's weapon are part of that angularity.  Even Batman's cape is less fluid and more straight-lined than usual.  That's what happens when it's this cold: everything freezes and becomes breakable.  If you have ever seen an exhibition where a balloon or something soft is dipped in liquid nitrogen, you can appreciate how cold it is in these pictures.  The balloon, or rose, or whatever it is, is dipped in the liquid nitrogen; it freezes, and then they tap it with with a ruler and the thing breaks into shards like glass.

Seth loved physics, and so I can be pretty sure that he had that whole idea in mind when he did this freezing page.  

3 comments:

j_ay said...

Excellent to hear you had a peaceful Flowering Nose day.
Orange juice and a banana were raised over here, and when pen hit paper Seth was thought of.
Needless to say very few off us can pull off the wonder, like you show here, that he did.

Vicki said...

I had almost stopped looking at Seth's work for the details of how the forms tell underlying parts of the story. And I didn't start to realize how frozen the whole page is until I started really looking at it. Those things go under the radar, but somewhere in your body you get it.

Schantz Julien said...

Fantastic piece of art... I'm jealous I wish I possessed such great page.