Darth Vader's Suffering in a Blood-Red Haze — Print & Oil Painting

The end of the set, and there is no face left to paint. A helmet is turned three-quarters to the left and fills the lower two-thirds of the sheet: domed crown, flared brow, black lenses, the ridged mouthpiece, the vents at the cheek. It is handled loosely, grey scumbled over black, with the long highlight down the dome broken rather than continuous.

This is by a wide margin the darkest of the four. The background keeps the same dragged verticals and the same spatter, but the red has been pushed back to a burnt maroon that only opens into a proper crimson in one band level with the lenses. Below that, the last of the cool grey survives along the bottom edge.

Across the top, spaced wider than any of the earlier words because it is longer, is SUFFERING. The drips run through every letter. Where the previous sheets set a word above a bowed head, this one sets it above a mask, and that difference is the reason for arranging the four in order at all.

The order is not the artist's invention. A Jedi Master sets those four terms out in exactly this sequence in the first film of the prequel trilogy: fear, then anger, then hate, then suffering. The series simply gives each one a portrait and lets the last of them arrive wearing a helmet.

Part of our Star Wars collection, closing a run that opens with the boy and passes through the sheet marked HATE.