The Millennium Falcon's Cockpit at Lightspeed — Print & Oil Painting

A photographic interior with no people in it. The viewpoint is set behind and between the two front seats, both of which show only as dark shapes at the bottom corners, so the picture puts the viewer in the space the crew has just left.

The canopy is the subject. It arches across the entire top of the frame as a fan of segmented panes, and the artist has painted its ribs and struts as worn green-grey metal with chipped paint, grime in the joints and a soft sheen where the light catches. The lower centre of the arch carries a smaller circular window inside the larger one, which gives the whole structure an oddly ecclesiastical shape.

Through the glass, the streaks. White lines radiate outward from a single point just below the centre of the arch, short and dense near the middle, stretching to long hard bars at the edges. There is no colour in them at all, and no star is allowed to stay a point.

Along the bottom runs the console, and it is the only warm passage in the image: rows of small square buttons in blue, red and amber, ranks of toggle switches, three levers standing up in the middle, a scatter of labelled plates. Every light on it is on and none of them is bright.

The whole thing sits at less than a fifth of full brightness. A dark cabin, a lit instrument panel, and a windscreen full of moving light is the oldest cockpit composition there is, and the picture earns it by keeping the metal shabby. Part of our Star Wars collection, next to the same freighter seen from outside and the two men who usually occupy these seats.