Darth Malgus Stands Armored in a Smoky Haze — Print & Oil Painting

No room, no floor, no horizon: this is a figure study on an empty ground, and the only thing behind him is a soft grey bloom of smoke that widens out from the shoulders and fades to black at every edge. Even the surface he stands on is suggested rather than drawn.

That leaves the armour to carry the picture, and it has been described like a specification. Broad angular pauldrons over layered chest plates; a segmented abdomen; ribbed thigh and shin guards; heavy boots with a bright red flash across the toe. Small red panels and thin red seams are set into the black at the chest, the forearm, the hip and the knee, and they are the only lit points on the whole body.

The head sits pale above all that black: a bare skull with the lower face taken up by a heavy dark respirator, its ducts running back under the jaw. The eyes are two small red points. Because the smoke behind him is lightest exactly at head height, the skull is framed by the one bright passage in the canvas.

The blade is held out and down from the right hand, running to the lower left corner as a straight red line with a faint wash of red spilling across the ground beneath it. The other arm hangs loose. The measured saturation is among the lowest in the group, which is the right reading: this is a black-and-grey picture with four or five red events placed into it very deliberately.

Our Star Wars collection sets this against the same armour standing in a hangar and the head and shoulders taken in close.