Ahsoka Tano's Headdress in Three Golden Silhouettes — Print & Oil Painting

Three shapes on a black field, and nothing else at all. No face, no eyes, no body: the figure exists only where the stripes are, and the black between them is doing as much work as the paint.

What is drawn is the head of a Togruta, reduced to the pattern that runs over her horns and head-tails. Each of the three is cut out in the same warm gold, mottled and grainy like beaten metal, and each is instantly readable as the same person even though not one of them has a mouth.

They are ordered by age from left to right, and the growth is the entire subject. The left silhouette is short and rounded, the horns barely clearing the head, the tails stopping high. The centre one is longer in every direction, with a marked diamond at the brow and a narrow banded shape falling below the chin. The right one is the tallest and widest, the horns swept up and out, the striping broken into more and finer bands.

The species detail is exact. Montrals and lekku keep growing throughout a Togruta's life, so a silhouette taken twenty years apart genuinely does change shape, and this artist has built a triptych out of a piece of anatomy rather than out of an expression.

Part of our Star Wars collection, next to the youngest of the three painted in full and the tallest one, white bladed, seen years later.