Darth Maul Leaps Beneath Twin Suns in the Desert — Print & Oil Painting

Drawn in a bold comic manner (confident contour, flat local colour, shadow blocked in as shape), and composed so that the figure comes straight at the viewer out of the middle of the frame.

He is sprung low with both legs braced wide, the double-bladed hilt held overhead and level so that its two red blades run clean off the left and right edges of the canvas. That horizontal bar across the top of the picture is the strongest line in it, and it locks the whole composition together.

The other arm is the part worth stopping on. It reaches out and down toward us, hand open, fingers hooked and rendered larger than they should be because they are nearer, a small piece of forced perspective that puts the viewer within reach. The face above it is grinning with the teeth bared, tattooed in hard red and black, the eyes a flat yellow.

The robe is a coarse grey-brown, hood up, torn along every hem and dragged by the movement, and the ground beneath him is stirred into loops of dust that the artist has drawn as line rather than painted as haze.

Two suns hang in the sky behind, one high and pale, one lower and orange, over eroded rock spires, mauve cloud and a small craft crossing at the far left. That pairing names the planet, and it is a place this character came to for one reason only, many years after everyone had stopped expecting him. Part of our Star Wars collection, beside the night duel in the same desert and what was left of him afterwards.