X-Wings Land on Water, Trailing Towering Spray — Print & Oil Painting

Five fighters running very low across open water, and five columns of white spray standing up behind them. The spray is the subject. Each column rises far higher than the craft that made it, pale and feathered at the top, and together they set a row of vertical marks across the middle of a canvas that is otherwise entirely horizontal.

The formation is loose rather than parade-perfect: two stepped back on the left, two on the right, one dropped forward and low at the bottom centre. The artist has kept them small. They occupy perhaps a fifth of the picture, and everything else is water, weather and distance.

Colour has been almost entirely withheld. Slate-grey sea, a low coastline of green-black hills on the right, an overcast sky with one bright silver break in it. The only saturated notes anywhere are the red and orange squadron markings along the hulls, and at this scale they are the size of a fingernail. It is the most restrained palette in the group by a wide margin.

What sells it is the height of the viewpoint. We are above and behind, looking down the line of travel, so the columns of spray read as depth rather than as height, the trail of five machines that were somewhere else a second ago. Nobody is shooting at anything. It is a picture about speed over water.

Our Star Wars collection flies it with the single fighter at the sound barrier and the canyon run.