Anakin Skywalker Reaches Out Amid Crimson Flames — Print & Oil Painting

A wide canvas soaked in red, worked with a loaded brush and a palette knife so that the background is all texture and no description: vertical columns of dark crimson, scraped horizontal drags, and a scatter of bright orange flecks that could be embers or could be paint.

The head sits high and slightly right of centre, and it is the only part of the picture given careful drawing. The hair is loose and lit warm along the top, the jaw is set, the brows are down, and the eyes look directly at the viewer with the lower lids tightened. There is a fine line at one brow where a scar runs.

The arm is the whole composition. It reaches out of the canvas toward us in hard foreshortening, sleeve falling back, ending in a black gloved hand with the fingers spread and the palm turned outward. The hand is nearer to us than anything else in the frame and the artist has kept it darker than everything else too, so it reads as a hole in the fire.

That glove is not a costume detail. The right hand under it was lost in a duel years before this moment and replaced with a machine, which makes it the first piece of the man to stop being a man.

Colour discipline holds the piece together: every warm value belongs to the fire and the skin, every cool one to the robe, and there is no third note anywhere. From our Star Wars collection, alongside the same face above the fires themselves and the red-eyed portrait taken moments before the fall.