Darth Vader's Blade Glows Aboard the Death Star — Print & Oil Painting

Vader from the chest up, close to the picture plane, in a very dark chamber. The blade is already lit and held low, so it crosses the bottom of the frame as one horizontal bar of red. There is no lunge and no guard, just a weapon being held while something else is being said.

The room does the lighting. Behind him a great curved wall recedes into the dark, punched with hundreds of small lit rectangles, and that scatter of cold pale windows supplies nearly all the illumination in the picture. It rims the helmet along the top of the dome and down one cheek, and leaves the front of the mask entirely black.

The blade's glow rises just far enough to catch the underside of the mask, the ribbed collar and the gloves. Between the two light sources the mask itself stays unreadable, which is the correct decision: it cannot change expression, so the artist has kept it as a hole in the middle of a lit room.

The title tells you which moment this is, and the painting is built around the fact that the face delivering the revelation is a moulded shell. Everything expressive has been pushed out into the architecture behind it.

From our Star Wars collection, next to the duel this scene ends and the Empire Strikes Back portrait.