AT-AT Walkers Advance Across the Snows of Hoth — Print & Oil Painting

A long horizontal canvas with the horizon set low and the sky handed over to weather. The nearest walker stands a little left of centre, caught mid-stride with one foreleg lifted and swinging, close enough that the plating on its flank fills a third of the picture: dull white gone grey at the joints, streaked with rust, panel seams and access hatches picked out in dark line.

Its head is turned to the right and both chin guns are firing. The bolts leave as short thick red bars and stretch into long thin ones further out, four or five of them crossing the right half of the frame at slightly different heights. That spread of red is the only saturated colour in an image otherwise made of white, pale blue and grey.

Two more machines follow at intervals behind and to the left, smaller and paler, and further ones dissolve into haze until they are barely four-legged smudges. A single speeder cuts across the upper left as a dark chip against the cloud. The spacing is unhurried. Nothing here is charging.

The right foreground is where the cost has been put. A speeder lies broken on the snow with one wing bent up and black smoke lifting off it, and beside the wreck a small figure in an orange flight suit stands upright in the open. He is perhaps a fortieth of the height of the machine in front of him, and he is the only person visible anywhere in the canvas.

This sits in our Star Wars collection, with the speeders still in the air and one of their pilots on the ground.