General Grievous black and white portrait — Print & Oil Painting

The canvas is a tall narrow strip, close to twice as high as it is across, and the figure has been folded to fit it. He is hunched forward with the shoulders driven up around the mask, the spine curved, the cape hanging the full length of the panel, and every limb pulled in tight to the vertical.

The mask is the one passage given real detail. A long bone-coloured skull with a heavy ridged brow, a narrow slot across the eyes, vertical teeth ribbing the lower half, and a hood of dark cloth pulled around it. The head is turned down and slightly toward us.

Count the arms and there are four. Two hang at the left, elbows out, hands open with the fingers spread and jointed like pliers; two more come down the right side of the body. In the lowest of them a hilt is legible, gripped side on with the emitter turned toward us. Nothing is ignited.

The whole thing is painted in four values and no more: dead black for the cape and the torso, two greys for the mechanical limbs, white for the highlights. Edges are cut, not blended. Behind him the board has been left raw, an off-white carrying just enough yellow to register as a colour rather than as a grey.

Inside that duranium frame there is very little left of what he started as, a warlord off a world that had been at war long before the Confederacy ever reached it, and the hilts he carries were taken one at a time off the Jedi he killed. From our Star Wars collection, beside the same four arms with every blade lit and the same flat treatment given to a human face.