Asajj Ventress Looms Over a Skull in the Ashes — Print & Oil Painting

Both weapons are in the same fist. Her right hand is closed around two hilts at once, held low at the hip, and the blades leave it as a narrow parallel pair that crosses the whole left side of the canvas on a shallow rising line. The other hand stays open and empty.

The skull is the second subject. It occupies the bottom right corner, a good metre of grey bone with a heavy horned crest and one deep socket turned toward us, half sunk into the rise she is standing on. Nothing in the picture explains what it came off.

The country behind is red from edge to edge: burnt orange sky, black thorn shapes arching out of the haze like the ribs of something enormous, a horizon that dissolves instead of ending. The whole world has been painted at one temperature.

Against it she is the only cool thing on the canvas. Paper-coloured skin, black eyes, a leather corset laced tight, a red hood collapsed around the shoulders in stiff folds, red cloth wound up one forearm, straps and iron rings across the hip, both legs bound in dark bands.

She was born to the witches of Dathomir and went back to them long after Dooku had finished with her, and their magic was never anything the Jedi had a word for. A red country with bones in it is the right ground for that half of her life. Part of our Star Wars collection, alongside the same figure standing against a wall of fire and the ally she trusted least.