Anakin Skywalker's Fiery Red Gaze Before the Fall — Print & Oil Painting

One light source, one colour, one face. A red blade enters at the lower left corner and runs up across the canvas on a long diagonal, and everything else in the picture is simply whatever that blade happens to reach.

It reaches the face almost completely. Forehead, bridge of the nose, near cheek and upper lip are all a heavy saturated red; the far side of the head falls away into a red-brown so deep it barely separates from the background. There is no second light anywhere: no rim, no fill. The hair is picked out only where individual curls catch the glow, which turns it into a row of thin bright filaments around a dark mass.

The eyes are the payoff and they are handled with restraint. Under a hard-set brow they hold the smallest and palest highlight in the whole image, two bright rings that read almost white against all that red. The artist has not tinted them yellow, and has not painted them blue either. They take the colour of the thing he is holding.

Nothing else is offered. Dark robes, no setting, no incident, and the lowest contrast of any canvas in this group despite the ferocity of the colour. It is a portrait of a man lit entirely by a decision, painted with great care not to say when the decision was made.

From our Star Wars collection. Its companion, the poster in muted red and grey, takes the same subject with all of the heat removed.