Took me six months, off and on, to do this one and i am quite pleased with it. It’s a much looser style than i have ever used before and one which i intend to make my regular thing from now on. It’s much more expressive, more fun to work with, and actually easier to execute, so what’s not to like?
The subject is, of course, the great comic book villain The Joker. Mr. J is my second favorite comic book character, behind the classic Clowngirl Harley Quinn — as opposed to the current Albino Hooker Harley — so it was a given that sooner or later i would get ’round to doing a portrait of the great man.
Both the title and the frame are essential to making this piece work. The title contains two jokes, the first being a variation on “Joe Kerr,” a pseudonym Mr. J sometimes uses in the comics, the second being the idea that anyone would consider such a man to be deserving of the title “esquire,” in the English sense of the term! The frame — in combination with the title — is meant to suggest that this is a formal portrait and that, therefore, some poor bastard of a painter had to sit there for God knows how many hours looking at that face! I should think it enough to drive an artistic person to rent a room at Arkham…
