Darth Vader Choking a Soldier — Print & Oil Painting

The canvas holds two heads and gives them opposite jobs. One is upright, centred, and made of moulded black plastic that can tell you nothing. The other is upside down along the bottom edge, close to the viewer, and every muscle in it is readable. All the emotion in the picture has been pushed into the man who is losing.

He wears a pale grey tunic with a stiff collar and a peaked cap that has stayed on his head, which is a small and horrible detail. His throat is stretched back and up, the chin high, the mouth open, and the skin has been painted in hot ochres and oranges against the cool grey of the uniform, so the flush of the face is the second brightest event on the canvas. A gloved hand comes up toward his own collar and gets no further.

The armour above him is not painted black at all. It is built from blue-violet, slate and cold white, laid on thickly with a loaded brush so the ridges of paint catch real light, and only the lenses and the mouth grille are allowed to go properly dark. The chest panel and its row of switches are picked out crisply; the cape falls away to the right in broad, almost careless sweeps.

Everything behind is red. Not a lit red or a burning red, just a wall of it, worked in vertical strokes that hint at columns and a doorway without ever committing to architecture. The blade hangs low in the left fist, angled down and forward, throwing no light on anything, more a piece of punctuation than a weapon.

The right hand does the work, held out flat with the fingers curled and the thumb apart, several feet from the man it is killing. That distance is the entire point of the gesture, and it is the one thing about the character that has never needed to be explained to anybody. Part of our Star Wars collection, beside the same grip staged at three different scales and the hand alone, reaching through smoke.