Mahr 1991

Boris Vallejo painted Mahr with what looks like acrylic, maybe mixed with oil, and airbrushing to achieve a sort of photorealism. Look at how Vallejo manages a tight contrast between a very dramatic and highly rendered scene. Check the softness around the wings of the bat against the super-real body of the woman, the two central figures in the piece. There is a real mastery of the uncanny and the painterly. The light and shadow are so extreme, as if this is a stage play rather than a scene from life. The musculature of the woman is so extreme it appears almost as a caricature, a cartoon of how a superheroine is supposed to look. Like the work of Frank Frazetta, Vallejo constructs a way of seeing a kind of hyper-real fantasy. Vallejo's work, like that of many comic artists, points to a way of seeing that is always open to fantasy.