Darth Vader's Crimson-Tinged Hand Reaches Through Smoke — Print & Oil Painting

The ground here is white paper, and that changes everything. Most paintings of this character start from black and add light; this one starts from a bare pale sheet and adds a figure to it in wet ink, leaving broad areas of the canvas entirely empty. There is more untouched white in this picture than there is Vader.

He is painted from the knees up, turned three-quarters, and the cape is a single enormous black wash thrown to the left with its edges feathering into the paper where the brush ran dry. The helmet is drawn with a few decisive strokes; the chest panel is a small block of grey with its lights indicated rather than described. Nothing is outlined.

The right arm reaches out level, across the picture, and it is here that the artist breaks the scheme: the glove and the whole forearm are washed in transparent red, and that red is allowed to run, bleeding down off the fingers, spattering into the white beyond the hand, pooling again at the boots and along the hem of the cape. It is the only colour in the image and it behaves like a stain rather than like light.

Reaching sideways rather than at the viewer keeps the gesture cold. We are watching from beside it, at a distance, on a sheet that is otherwise almost empty. The red has got as far as the hand and the feet, which is a quiet way of saying where it came from and where it is going.

Part of our Star Wars collection, and the closest relative of the ink-wash silhouette beneath a red moon; for the same reach painted in near-total darkness instead, see the shadow canvas.