General Grievous Battling Clone Troopers in a Melee — Print & Oil Painting

A crowded, wide, thoroughly busy canvas with no empty space anywhere in it. The artist has filled every corner, and the picture works by hierarchy rather than by isolation.

Grievous is at the centre-left, mid-lunge, his arms already split so that four limbs work at once. A green blade sweeps across the upper centre, a second green runs out low to the right, and a blue one drops away to the lower left. His cape flies out behind in a dull maroon mass, which is the largest single shape in the picture and the reason the eye lands on him first.

Clone troopers hold the entire right side, packed shoulder to shoulder in white plate with blue markings, rifles up, some kneeling and some pushing forward. Blue bolts leave their barrels in short hard strokes and cross the frame at a dozen angles. Battle droids crowd the left in tan ranks, thinner and looser, and a domed vehicle sits behind them at the upper left.

Light comes from the middle distance, where dust and fire have been laid in as a broad gold haze that silhouettes everything in front of it. The values are kept high and the whole canvas reads warm, so the blades and the bolts have to be saturated to carry.

The composition puts one figure with four weapons against a line of men with one each, and it lets the crowding argue the case rather than the drawing. From our Star Wars collection, beside the moment after, at close range and the same troopers fighting on their own account.