Spock in a Maroon Uniform, Inked Portrait — Print & Oil Painting

The drawing has been photographed rather than scanned and the sheet it sits on is part of what we are looking at. A painted rectangle occupies the middle of the frame and around it a border of bare paper shows, mottled blue and grey, uneven at the edges, with the artist's monogram and the year 2018 written into the lower left corner of the painted area itself.

Inside that rectangle every plane of the face is described by line. Marker and coloured pencil have been hatched in clear directions across the cheek, the temple and the long vertical creases running from the nose to the jaw, and the black bowl cut has been laid in with dense strokes and then lifted with yellow white along the top. The eyebrows angle up hard at the outer end; one pointed ear stands clear on the left.

This is not a young man. The mouth is set, the eyelids are heavy, and the whole head has been given the loose skin and deep folds of somebody a long way past the middle of a career. A thick ribbed cream turtleneck closes the picture at the bottom, with a jacket collar showing beneath it. Worth saying plainly: that jacket reads hotter and more orange here than the deep wine colour it takes from.

The uniform is the one designed for the 1982 film, a heavy double breasted wool that the crews nicknamed for its colour and complained about in the heat. And the age is not a licence either: by 1991 the character had left the fleet for diplomacy and turned up on the enemy homeworld without authorisation, working with an underground movement on reuniting two peoples who had split thousands of years earlier, and calling it a personal mission when asked. Part of our Star Trek collection, beside his father, flanked by Spock and Kirk and the same head at rest with the eyes closed.