Ewoks killing stormtroopers and AT ST — Print & Oil Painting

A tall canvas in cold grey-green, and the fog is doing the composition. Enormous pale trunks rise the full height of the frame and vanish upward without showing a canopy, each rank paler than the one in front, so the forest reads as depth rather than as trees.

The walker is up in the top third, and it is losing. It has been caught mid-stagger with the cockpit pitched over to one side, and two small figures are already up on the roof of it, one of them swinging something over its head. Nothing about the machine looks under control.

The middle band belongs to the pack. Four or five Ewoks are worked into it at different distances, all of them upright and all of them shouting: one at the centre with both arms raised and a spear across the sky, one at the right pushed close to the picture plane with the mouth wide open and the teeth showing under a hood of hide and bone, others further back with spears angled up. The fur is painted in dense broken strokes and the faces are given real anatomy, snout, brow, bared canines, so they land as animals rather than as toys.

At the bottom left, two stormtroopers lie in the leaf litter. One is on his back with his arms out, the other face down beside him, and both are painted the brightest white in the picture. They are the only clean surfaces anywhere on the canvas and they are the only things in it not moving.

Reading the three bands in order gives the whole event without a single line of narration: the dead at the bottom, the pack in the middle, the machine at the top with company it did not invite. Part of our Star Wars collection, beside the same fight relocated to a ruined city and the walker on a day when the patrol went normally.