General Grievous Aboard a Spaceship With Battle Droids — Print & Oil Painting

An interior scene with a view, and the view is doing most of the work. The right half of the background is a long viewport, and through it the curve of a planet runs across the frame with a thin band of blue atmosphere along its edge, a moon hanging beyond it, and a small orange bloom of an explosion further out. Nothing in the room acknowledges any of that.

Grievous stands at the left, upright for once, in a heavy maroon cape that hangs from the shoulders in soft folds. The pale mask is turned three-quarters toward the centre and both hands are open and low. He is listening rather than acting, and the artist has given him none of the crouched, insectile posture he usually gets.

A slim battle droid leans in from above at the centre, tan and long-limbed, one arm raised. In the near right foreground, very large and cropped by the frame, stands a second droid in blue and cream plating with a slot visor and a heavy shoulder assembly, seen from behind and slightly below, its arm extended down into the middle of the picture.

On the flat of that outstretched hand sits the only bright thing in the room: a small blue figure standing on a projector plate, transparent, lit from within, throwing a cold glow up onto the droid's forearm and across the deck. It is perhaps a tenth of the height of the figures looking at it.

Everything else is muted grey and dull red, so the eye goes to that little blue ghost first and works outward. A command scene staged around a hologram the size of a hand is a good way of painting authority that arrives from somewhere else. Part of our Star Wars collection, next to the same figure surveying a plain of the dead and the duel that eventually finds him.