Darth Nihilus Reaches Out Through Crimson Smoke — Print & Oil Painting

The hand is the subject. It comes straight out of the canvas at the viewer, open, fingers spread and hooked, painted much larger than scale allows because it is nearer than everything else, and the artist has modelled it in two colours at once, cold blue along the top of the knuckles and a deep red underneath.

Behind it the figure stands almost square. The mask is tipped slightly down and lit from below: bone-coloured, hollow-eyed, with a fine red line running down the centre of the forehead and red marks curving across the cheeks. A heavy cowl swallows the skull and falls in coarse folds over both shoulders.

The robes are worked as thick woven cloth rather than as drapery, with a broad wrapped sash at the waist, and the right arm is raised so that a red blade runs down the right edge of the frame from a hilt held high. That vertical and the outstretched hand divide the canvas cleanly into a threat and an instrument.

Colour is graded top to bottom: a cold deep blue in the upper background falling into red at the floor, with small orange embers drifting up through the lower half and red mist gathering around the hem. Nothing else is described: no wall, no ground, no horizon.

An open hand held toward someone is this character's actual method, and the title he carried says why: the Lord of Hunger did not need to reach anybody to reach them. Part of our Star Wars collection, next to the version where almost nothing is shown at all and the lightning thrown from both hands.