Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi Stand Back to Back — Print & Oil Painting

Two men, spine to spine, each looking out over the shoulder that faces us. It is one of the oldest arrangements in poster design and it survives because it does two things at once: it says these people are together, and it says they are watching different directions.

The blades hold the frame open. One runs up the far left edge, the other up the far right, both blue, both dead vertical and both cropped by the top of the canvas, so the composition sits inside a pair of bright columns with the two heads between them. Nothing else in the picture is vertical, which is why the device works.

The style is the flat, sculpted look of the animated series, softened here with airbrushed modelling: hair painted as solid carved masses, faces built from a few clean planes, eyes drawn with hard graphic lines. The younger man on the left has a short scar-free brow, a set jaw and a comm piece at his cheek; the bearded one on the right is broader, calmer, and the only figure in the frame whose mouth suggests he has been in this position before.

Both wear campaign kit over the robes rather than robes alone: a blue-marked chest plate and pauldron on the left, a pale segmented cuirass on the right, scuffed and battle-marked. Behind them the canvas washes out to a white flare at centre, with a starfield above, and to the far left a gunship and a pale warship dissolving into the haze. Saturation across the whole image is kept very low so that the two blades are the only saturated colour anywhere.

The relationship the pose describes did not last, and the painting is more interesting for knowing it. From our Star Wars collection, next to the same two crossing those blades instead of covering each other and the older of the pair studied alone in the same armour.