Ewok against Empire AT ST — Print & Oil Painting

The measured saturation on this canvas is barely a tenth. It is effectively a monochrome, and the artist has painted a Star Wars subject in the visual language of a war photograph: wet ash, falling snow, broken concrete, smoke standing in the air with nowhere to go.

The walker dominates. It comes through the ruins at a stride, seen from below, its cockpit tilted forward and its two lamps burning white straight down the middle of the picture. The plating is filthy, streaked with rust and soot, and the artist has hung cable off it and dented the panels, so the machine reads as heavily used rather than newly issued. A second lamp glows amber on the side arm.

Underneath it, tiny, stands an Ewok. It is turned away from us on a heap of rubble, hooded, and it holds a burning bottle up in one raised hand. That flame is the only saturated colour in the entire image and it sits at roughly knee height to the machine.

Behind and to the right a second small hooded figure scrambles across the debris. Everything beyond them is a flattened industrial skyline in grey: gantries, a wall, small fires burning low in the wreckage, snow or ash coming down across all of it.

The scene is a long way from the forest these creatures are usually painted in, and the transposition is the whole idea. A fur-covered animal with a firebomb against an armoured walker in a levelled city is an image about asymmetry, and draining the colour out of it makes the point without raising its voice. From our Star Wars collection, next to the forest ambush that goes the other way and the walker left to the moss.