General Grievous and Asajj Ventress fighting — Print & Oil Painting

Two lean figures, four blades, and a setting reduced to almost nothing. The background is a dim tangle of bare trunks and roots in maroon and umber, unlit, with no sky and no ground plane, so the fight happens in a pocket with no dimensions.

Grievous takes the left. He is crouched low on his back legs with the torso pitched forward, the bone-pale mask turned across the frame, and one arm raised high holding a green blade that runs up and out of the top left corner. The body is painted as a set of thin plated segments with visible gaps between them, more armature than anatomy.

Ventress holds the right and she is the more athletic drawing of the two. She lunges into the centre with the weight forward and one leg extended behind, wrapped in a dark bodysuit with bindings at the shins and forearms, a cloak swinging out behind the shoulders, the head covered and smooth. A red blade runs from each hand, one down to the lower left and one down to the lower right, and the hilts are curved rather than straight.

Those three blades plus his make a shallow star across the middle of the canvas, and the artist has let their glow do all the lighting: green on his mask and forearm, red along her thigh and the near edge of the cloak, and everything more than a body's width away left in the dark.

Both of these fighters were built as instruments by someone else and neither was ever a Sith, which is the quiet joke in a picture where a green blade taken from a dead Jedi is being swung at a pair of red ones. Part of our Star Wars collection, next to her portrait before a wall of fire and the weathered close study of his mask.