A Sith-Robed Ahsoka Tano Wields Twin Crimson Blades — Print & Oil Painting

Every cool thing about this character has been reheated. The head-tails and horns, striped white and blue in every other painting of her here, are charcoal grey banded with black. The skin runs from rust to dried plum. The air behind her rolls in maroon and dusty pink, lit from nowhere in particular.

The face has been redrawn with the same economy. The marks above the eyes are crimson instead of white, the diamond at the brow is a red one, the eyes are pale and narrowed, and the mouth stays shut. Nothing is snarling. It is a calm face, which is the unsettling part.

She wears a dark robe open down the front with no sleeves, falling in long unbroken panels to the floor, a bare midriff between them, an oval buckle riding low on the hip and armoured cuffs strapped over both forearms. The cloth is painted almost flat, so the body reads as the only modelled thing in the frame.

Two red blades leave the picture on parallel diagonals toward the upper right, one from the hilt in her lowered right hand, the other crossing above her shoulder. Parallel lines are a risky choice in a fight painting because they remove all tension between the weapons, and here it works: she is not fighting anyone.

The premise is an invention rather than a scene from the stories. In them she leaves the Jedi Order before the purge, is hunted afterwards, and never picks up a red blade at all, which is exactly what makes the counterfactual worth painting. Part of our Star Wars collection, next to another dark reading of the same character and the portrait in which only her eyes have changed.