General Grievous's Mask Stained With Blood and Rust — Print & Oil Painting

Nine-tenths of this sheet is pure black. The measured brightness is under a tenth, the lowest reading of any piece here apart from the red corridor, and nothing has been given an outline, a background or a floor. The image is built entirely out of what the light happens to reach.

What it reaches is a mask, and it has been treated badly. The bone plates are mottled and marbled with rust brown, dried red and dirty ochre, cracked along their length, and stained in patches that look soaked in rather than splashed on. The two long side plates catch a pale highlight down their outer edges and that is the brightest thing in the picture.

The eye sockets are empty. Not dim, not shadowed: two flat black voids with nothing burning inside them, and after the other studies in this set that absence is the whole event. Every other version of this head is lit from within.

Below the jaw the structure barely survives. A curved shoulder assembly spreads out on both sides at the very edge of visibility, cables and vertical bars hang in the dark beneath the chin, and the lower edge of the composition tapers away into nothing at all.

The result belongs to the tradition of the memento mori rather than to the action poster. A skull-shaped mask, stained, cracked and unlit, floating in black, is a picture of a thing that has stopped rather than a warning about a thing that is coming. Part of our Star Wars collection, alongside the same mask with the jaw open and the eyes burning and the green-lit study of the plating.