Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker Duel on a Platform — Print & Oil Painting

An extremely wide, extremely reduced canvas. The artist works in flat angular slabs of colour with the brush marks left square and unblended, and nothing anywhere in the picture is modelled: rock, metal, fire and figure are all built from the same hard-edged planes. It reads more like a cut-paper design than like a painting of a place.

The left third is given over to solid black. Out of it, toward the centre, a structure of dark ledges and broken beams steps down into a lake of molten rock, and that lake is laid in as bright flat shapes of scarlet, orange and yellow with no gradient in them at all. Behind everything, red-lit industrial masses rise into a hot haze.

The two men are tiny. One stands on the near ledge, close enough to be read as a body, a thin pale line of blade extended down and to the side; the other is further off on a separate outcrop across the molten ground, small enough to be a single dark mark. Between them there is nothing but heat and a considerable drop.

Painting the most famous duel in the saga at this scale changes what it is about. There is no choreography to admire and no expression to read, just two dark specks standing on separate rocks above a furnace, with the whole canvas insisting on how much ground now lies between them.

From our Star Wars collection, alongside the duel beneath a fiery sky and the closer Mustafar canvas.