501st Legion Clone Wars — Print & Oil Painting

The same legion, painted as though it had been photographed. Seven troopers stand in a shallow arc across a horizontal canvas, snow falling in front of them in hard white specks, the sky behind them reduced to smoke with a low orange band burning out somewhere on the left.

What separates this from every other clone painting is the dirt. The armour is not white. It is grey where the snow has wetted it, rust-brown in long streaks down the thighs and shins, and scraped back to bare plastoid at every edge that has met anything. The blue markings survive only as dark navy shapes under the grime: a star across the faceplate, a fin over the crown, chevrons at the chest. The artist has let several of them be lost almost completely.

The line is not a parade. The men stand at slightly different angles and slightly different distances, weapons held low or slung, a rifle with a brass-coloured barrel resting across a forearm at the far left, and near the right end a single red device painted on a shoulder plate: the one warm mark on any of the seven. Nobody is posed. They are standing where they stopped.

That is the picture's argument and it is a good one. Rendered at this level of grime and with this little colour, an army of identical men reads instead as seven separate ones, told apart by nothing but the pattern of their damage.

From our Star Wars collection, beside the animated-style version of the same unit and the legion marching beneath a gunship.