Darth Nihilus Unleashes Lightning and a Crimson Blade — Print & Oil Painting

The canvas is split down the middle into two temperatures and the figure stands exactly on the seam. Everything to the left is cold: cobalt, steel blue, white. Everything to the right is heated to maroon and crimson. He is painted in the narrow band where the two meet, lit from behind by a white flare that halos the hood.

The left arm carries the cold half. It reaches out and slightly down, palm open, and a forked bolt of blue-white energy leaves the hand and runs all the way to the bottom left corner in three ragged branches. Caught inside the light near his fingers are two pale shapes with hollow faces, half formed, being pulled toward him rather than fleeing.

The right arm carries the hot half, raised high with a red blade held vertical against the darker ground. Both arms are extended to almost the same angle, which gives the whole image an unsettling symmetry: a figure holding two kinds of destruction at arm's length and using neither.

The mask is small in the frame and painted with fewer strokes than in most portraits of him, but the essentials survive: the black sockets, the ridged nose, the red mark running down the centre. The hood around it has been bleached almost white by the light behind.

The picture is really about appetite rather than combat. This Sith Lord fed on the Force itself and emptied an entire world of it, and the two dim figures dissolving beside his open hand say more about him than the sword does. From our Star Wars collection, next to the same act painted against a wall of turquoise light and a second study of dark energy and a red blade.