Darth Vader's Ink-Wash Silhouette Beneath a Red Moon — Print & Oil Painting

The lightest canvas in this group by a distance, and one of the loosest. The ground is a flat warm cream, closer to raw paper than to primed canvas, and the figure has been laid onto it in black ink with a dry, half-loaded brush, scrubbed, dragged, flicked and spattered, with runs allowed to trail down from the lower edge of the cape and dry there.

He is turned three-quarters toward the left and cropped at the thigh. The artist has spent solid drawing on exactly two areas: the helmet, where the brow, the lens hollows and the grille are given real form, and the chest panel with the belt below it, rendered as a small block of precise mechanical detail. Everything else, the shoulder, the arm, the cape and the base, dissolves into strokes that stop describing a body about halfway down.

Behind the head sits a flat disc of dull red, printed rather than painted, with its own thin drips running down out of the bottom of it. It does not illuminate anything and it casts nothing. It is a graphic mark placed exactly where a halo goes, and the black of the helmet crosses in front of it.

Working this way means most of the image is empty cream paper, and the emptiness is doing real work: a character normally built out of darkness has been drawn here as a stain on a pale field, dissolving at the edges, held together by a mask and a control panel.

From our Star Wars collection, and the natural companion to the other ink-wash canvas, where the red is on the hand instead; see also the stormy sea portrait for the same figure given full paint.