Clone Helmets Line a Shadowed Battlefield in Silence — Print & Oil Painting

Where its companion piece comes in close, this one pulls all the way back and turns the subject into arithmetic. Forty-odd helmets stand on their stakes in ranks across the middle of a very wide canvas, small and evenly spaced, receding row behind row until the mist takes them. You end up counting, which is precisely the intention.

The light is almost gone. The whole picture sits in a narrow band of brown-black and dirty cream, with the brightest passage a pale hazy opening in the upper middle distance where the ground meets the fog. Nothing is described in detail anywhere; the helmets are pale ovals on dark sticks and nothing more.

Both foreground corners are blocked by enormous dark shapes thrown completely out of focus: a mass at the left, a taller one at the right with a faint red point in it. They act as a proscenium, and they place the viewer some way back, behind cover, looking out at the field rather than standing in it.

At the centre of the horizon, tiny, a single upright figure stands alone with a smear of pale ground behind it. It is the only vertical in the picture that is not a grave marker, and it has been painted at perhaps a fortieth of the height of the near shapes, so that the field of helmets stretches out enormous in front of one person.

Silence is a hard thing to paint and the method here is restraint: no fire, no wreck in focus, no weather event, no colour raised above a murmur. Part of our Star Wars collection, next to the close view of a single helmet from the same ground and the silhouette before a ruined city.