Darth Vader Crosses a Snow-Covered Battlefield at Night — Print & Oil Painting

Night, snow, and a horizon that has nearly stopped existing. The ground is a pale blue-white plain running the full width of the canvas; the sky above it is deep slate, thick with falling flakes, with one dark column of smoke climbing behind the figures. Nothing in the picture is warm.

Vader stands right of centre at full length, the cape hanging in one unbroken black mass down to the snow. He is the only true black in the image, and the artist has kept his edges hard while everything else, wreckage and walkers and weather, is softened by the air between us and it. His blade is lit and held low to the right, laying a short red reflection across the ground beneath it.

He is not alone. Standing at his shoulder, half a head shorter and painted in dark red and brown, is Ahsoka, with two white blades held low to the left. From any distance the two of them share a single silhouette: one dark mass on the plain with three blades coming out of it, red on one side, white on the other. The composition does something no caption could, putting them inside the same outline and letting the colours argue.

The rest is set dressing and it is very well judged. A wrecked craft lies half-buried at the left with its plating peeled open. Three or four walkers stand far off on the right, reduced to grey legs in the haze. Three red bolts streak down through the upper left corner, thin and fast, aimed at nothing the picture shows us.

Our Star Wars collection hangs this with the walkers advancing across the snows of Hoth and the two of them with blades locked.