Grand Admiral Thrawn Stands Beside a Hooded, Shadowed Figure — Print & Oil Painting

Two heads, one frame, and only one of them is allowed a face. The right two-thirds of the canvas is a blue face pushed so close to the picture plane that the far eye has been cropped away entirely: what survives is one eye, the bridge and tip of the nose, a set mouth and the edge of a jaw. The left third is a hood, and inside it a chin, a lip and one lit cheek. Where the eyes should be there is nothing but weave and shadow.

The lighting carries the argument. A cold cyan source stands off to the right and lays the blue face out in pale green-white; a red source works from the left and draws a thin hot line down the temple, the cheekbone and the side of the neck. Between the two, the shadow falling through the middle of the canvas is almost black, and the hooded figure is standing in it.

The Chiss skin is painted with real appetite for surface, with open pores, a faint roughness along the jaw and the grain of the brush left in the highlights so the blue never goes flat. The eye is the exception: a smooth red disc with a hotter core and no visible pupil, set under a heavily furrowed brow. It is the only part of the head finished like glass.

The other man gets the opposite treatment. All of his character is in fabric: coarse woven hood, deep folds, a dull red glow catching the lower lip and the creases around the mouth. He is never identified, and the picture is plainly enjoying that. The named man is painted in full light beside a figure the canvas refuses to resolve, and the order of precedence is settled by who is permitted to be seen.

Part of our Star Wars collection. See the profile lit in blue and red for the same two colour temperatures spent on one head alone, and the canvas with the shadow behind him for the same pairing at full length.