INTRO Don’t leave your jewellery where she can see it

SHOPPING

LIVE WELL, BUY BETTER

Jason Brooks original illustrations from Gray MCA, 5 Margaret’s Buildings, Bath; www.graymca.com

BLACK WIDOW

Seeing as this is a fashion issue, and seeing as we’re so enamoured of the fashion illustrations on offer at Gray MCA – the cool little gallery on Margaret’s Buildings, with something of a worldwide reputation for this stuff – we make no excuses for returning briefly to the well once more, if only so we can show you this cool chick by artist Jason Brooks, a contemporary master of the form, even if his illustrations do sometimes look like they must have originated in a 1940s edition of Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar. Who is she? Whoever you want her to be, we’re saying, but we’re perhaps thinking some film noir heroine played by Barbra Stanwyck, Jane Greer or Ava Gardner, or maybe the cousin of DC’s Catwoman or Marvel’s Black Widow in their original incarnations, back before they sported skin-tight latex and fought nominally on the side of good, and instead were – respectively – an icy, jewel-obsessed 1940s vamp in an evening gown, and an early ’60s Russian spy in a veil, fishnets and furs, looking like the doomed bad girl from one of the first 007 films. Whoever our girl is, like Jessica Rabbit she may not be bad, but she sure is drawn that way.