Ahsoka Tano Leaps Into Action With Twin Blades — Print & Oil Painting

The body is one long diagonal from the trailing foot at the lower left to the raised blade at the upper right, and every joint along that line is doing something. Rear leg extended and just leaving the floor, forward knee driven up, hips already rotated ahead of the shoulders, head turned back across the leading arm. The artist has caught the instant when a jump has committed but not yet cleared the ground.

Two blades, held in opposite grips. The long one is up and back in the left hand, running out of the top of the frame at a steep angle; the shorter one is reversed in the right hand and lies flat across the chest, pointing back along the direction she has come from. One is a threat and the other is a door she has closed behind her. They are the only saturated colour in the picture, a hard blue-white that bleaches to pure white down the centre of each blade.

The setting has been almost entirely emptied. Grey columns recede into the dark on both sides, the floor is a broad lilac-grey slab with a wet sheen, and there is no horizon, no sky, no scenery. What fills the space instead is dust: hundreds of small chips and grains suspended around her, lit from beneath, drifting rather than flying. They are the only evidence that anything happened here before this moment.

Her costume is the pale grey and blue of her later years, the montrals grown long and banded, the face narrower than the padawan she was. The choice of two blades of unequal length is hers and it is old: she took up the pairing young and never traded it for a simpler style.

In our Star Wars collection, near the twin blades raised in a dark cave and the pair crossed in a snowy forest.