Darth Maul's Face Emerges From Crimson Shadow — Print & Oil Painting

The darkest painting in this part of the collection and the one that hides the most. Perhaps a tenth of the canvas carries any information: the rest is black, warmed toward the edges by a deep red glow that never resolves into a wall, a floor or a sky.

The face floats high and slightly left of centre. The red and black pattern is drawn with real precision across the brow, the cheekbones and the jaw, the short horns are just legible against the ground, and two yellow-orange eyes sit inside it, catching more light than anything else in the picture.

Below the chin the figure simply stops being described. There are shoulders, an arm, a hand, all given as slightly different blacks, and the eye keeps sliding off them and back up to the face.

One long weapon crosses the whole canvas on a steep diagonal, lit at both ends, entering at the top right and leaving at the bottom left. Painting a double blade this way, as one continuous line through the body rather than as two beams, is unusually clean and it does most of the compositional work.

Part of our Star Wars collection, alongside another face surfacing out of total darkness and the same weapon painted in full light.