Anakin Skywalker's Anger in Muted Red and Gray Tones — Print & Oil Painting

This one is designed rather than staged. The head is a strict profile facing left, set low and a little off centre, and behind it the whole field has been dragged downwards with a wide blade: vertical streaks of deep red across the top third, cool grey-blue below, the two bleeding into one another in long wet runs with spatter thrown over the entire surface.

Across the upper band, in white capitals with wide letter spacing, sits a single word: ANGER. The artist has let the drips run down through the letters so that they are already being eaten by the background, and has set them high enough that they belong to the sheet rather than to the man.

The figure is painted at exactly the opposite temperature to that claim. Head bowed, eyes lowered, jaw slack, the hair pulled back and tied at the nape, a dark jacket over an open pale collar. There is no tension anywhere in the face, not in the brow, not at the mouth. Whatever the word above him asserts, the man beneath it is quiet.

That gap is the whole piece. The red is in the wall, the grey is in the man, and the feeling has been printed over his head instead of painted into him. It is a colder and a far more interesting way to handle the subject than putting fire in his eyes.

Part of our Star Wars collection, the second of four such sheets: it follows the one marked FEAR and answers the portrait lit by a red blade, where the same face is given nothing but heat.