The Smirking Anarchist
Some men just want to watch the world burn.
A maelstrom of rage and insanity, this unhinged mastermind tears through the city’s order and decorum with a wicked grin. Impossible to diagnose or to stop.
The Inspiration
The Smirking Anarchist is my homage to Heath Ledger‘s powerhouse performance as The Joker.
The face of the Joker has a plethora of scars and wrinkles, each with a vital role in his backstory. His eyes are piercing, yet recessed, his hair is bedraggled and greasy and his expression amused yet contemptuous. All of these details provide the great joy I get from capturing an iconic character using heat on wood: those difficult details. Bizarrely, the thing I found most challenging was to render his jacket and tie in such a way that they didn’t compete with his face for attention.
The Craft
Such a strong character needed plywood with a strong grain pattern, which provided an obstacle to be worked around when making this piece.
The piece looks like a mass of crisp, solid black line work, but that’s not the whole story. The hair contains myriad areas of varied shading in order to give it depth. The scars have subtle shading along with the dark, harsh lines to give them pucker. The shirt and tie fades were achieved with line shading of varied intensities.
