Captain Rex Stands Amid Falling Snow and Sparks — Print & Oil Painting

The helmet is painted alone, chest up, centred and nearly frontal, and then the artist has lifted the marking off its brow and repeated it twice, enormous, on the wall behind. Two blue hooked shapes flank the head at several times the size of the originals. The portrait and its own heraldry are sharing one canvas.

Everything on the armour is caked. The dome has gone grey under dried dust, the blue band across the brow is scraped back to bare surface in places, and grime has collected in every recess of the cheeks and the mouth vent. Two circular viewfinders are hinged down across the lower face, which gives the helmet its strange doubled stare: the dark visor slot above, two glass discs below.

Colour is split down the middle of the frame. The left is warm: a dull red glow with orange embers lifting and drifting through it. The right is cold blue, with one hard-edged blue plate on the shoulder catching the light. Snow crosses the whole picture in fine white specks and falls on both halves equally; it is the only element that ignores the division.

A thin fin stands up from the crown, and the whole head is tipped very slightly forward, which is the only gesture the picture allows itself. There is no face and no body language available here, so the artist has to carry the character on paint damage and posture alone, and does.

Those brow marks are borrowed rather than invented. They are a Mandalorian honour given for courage and worn on the helmet, a custom the clone army inherited from the Mandalorian instructors who trained it. Part of our Star Wars collection, next to the twin pistols raised before the Republic crest and the pair of him and his commander in the field.