Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi Cross Blades in Flames — Print & Oil Painting

A tall, narrow canvas with a fire filling the whole of it. The flame is painted as a solid vertical wall of yellow and orange running the full height of the picture, thickest in the middle, breaking into loose sparks at the edges. Both men have been placed hard against it, so that neither has anywhere to retreat to.

The two blades meet at a single point of white just right of centre, and the artist has let that contact bloom: a burst of light with two translucent discs thrown across the fire behind it, like a lens looking straight into the sun. It is the only cool light in the picture and it sits exactly where the two men are trying to overpower each other.

Costume carries the argument. Anakin comes in from the upper left in near-black leather and a heavy dark cloak that reads almost as a hole cut in the flame. Obi-Wan braces at the lower right in pale sand-coloured robes with a brown sash, crouched low with his weight forward. One figure absorbs the light, the other returns it, and the fire treats them very differently.

Both blades are blue, which is not an oversight. At this moment Anakin has taken a Sith name but is still carrying the weapon he built as a Jedi; the red one comes later. The picture catches him in the short interval where the only thing separating the two men is the direction they are pushing.

From our Star Wars collection. For the same fight stripped back to pure shadow see the silhouette version, and for it painted at full detail, the Kenobi and Skywalker canvas.