Darth Vader Stands Amid a Stormy Sea and Wreckage — Print & Oil Painting

Almost all the colour has been taken out of this one. Measured across the whole canvas it is grey-green and slate (storm cloud, black water, wet metal), and the single red blade is left carrying the entire chromatic weight of the picture on its own.

He is standing on a raft of wreckage in an open sea. Torn hull plate, a bent structural spar and unidentifiable debris are heaped into a low island, waves breaking white against its edges, rain coming down in fine slanted lines across everything. Behind him the sky is a single black mass with one fork of lightning at the right.

The suit has failed. Long orange seams glow through the tunic and down the left thigh as though something is burning inside it, the cape is shredded along its whole trailing edge, and the right leg below the knee has been stripped back to bare mechanical structure: exposed strut and joint, painted with the same care as the armour that should be covering it.

In the left hand, held low and loose at the hip, is a stormtrooper helmet. Two more of them are down on the wreckage at his feet, one face-down at the bottom of the frame and one further back at the left. He is not fighting anyone. He is the last thing standing on the raft.

Every part of the staging (the low horizon, the raised vantage, the tiny fallen figures) is the grammar of a monument, and the artist has undercut it by breaking the monument open and letting the fire show through. Part of our Star Wars collection, alongside the march through a Hoth blizzard and the mask cracked and consumed by ash.