Bossk Aims His Rifle in a Desert Bounty Hunt — Print & Oil Painting

Painted in the manner of a card illustration: heavy contour, saturated local colour, the figure pushed hard against the picture plane and cropped at both edges. Bossk holds the left half of a very wide frame, turned three-quarters away, both hands on a long rifle whose barrel runs the entire remaining width of the canvas.

The head is where the drawing is best. Trandoshan skull plates in mottled ochre and olive, the scales worked one by one across the brow and the jaw, a wide lipless mouth crowded with small teeth, and two red eyes set deep under a heavy ridge. He is not sighting along the weapon. The head is turned out past it, toward whatever stands off the left edge.

The flight suit is the loudest thing here: a hard chrome-yellow blocked in almost flat, set directly against the green scale of the arms and throat, broken only by a quilted vest, a chest strap and one bulky gauntlet. Yellow against green is an uncomfortable pairing and it is doing exactly what it was chosen to do.

Behind him an industrial site climbs into a hot ochre sky: fat rust-red tanks, ribbed towers, a banded dome at the right, gantries and pipe runs. Nothing organic appears anywhere in it and no second figure is shown. The sky is dragged out in long horizontal streaks of gold and brown, which pushes the whole canvas warm and leaves the reptile skin as the only cool note in it.

His species and the Wookiees have a long and ugly history, which is part of why a Trandoshan with a rifle is never painted at rest. From our Star Wars collection, alongside the droid hunter mid-firefight and Greedo turning his blaster on the Empire.