Ahsoka Tano against AT-AT — Print & Oil Painting

A vertical canvas with a walker in it, and the walker is not the point. The AT-AT stands a little right of centre in the middle distance, four legs planted wide across a shallow flooded plain, head lowered and turned a few degrees towards us. The sun sits directly behind its body, so the underside burns out into a white flare and the whole machine reads as a grey silhouette with light leaking between its legs.

The sky is the surprise. Instead of the usual Imperial slate the artist has painted lilac and rose cloud from the top of the canvas to the horizon, warm and high-keyed, with snow-capped ridges along the far edge and mist lying flat on the water. Scattered across it in two loose groups are TIE fighters, a dozen of them, small, black, painted as flat glyphs rather than as machines.

Ahsoka is in the lower left, standing on broken dark rock with her back to us, at perhaps a fifteenth of the canvas height. Both blades are lit and held out low and wide on either side of her body so the arms make a shallow V, and their white is the only cold light anywhere in the picture. Her montrals cut a clear notch out of the bright ground behind her.

The arrangement is a very old one: small figure, huge machine, open country. It works here because the artist has declined to make it grim. Somebody half the height of one foot of that walker is standing on a rock in fair weather with her weapons already out, and the picture will not say how it goes.

From our Star Wars collection, alongside the soldier beneath the same class of walker and another study of the white blades in mist.