General Grievous Glares in a Weathered Close-Up — Print & Oil Painting

A face filling the whole canvas, painted with a loaded brush and a palette knife and left deliberately rough. The pale bone-coloured mask is built from thick broken strokes with the ground showing through in places, and long runs of thinned paint drip down the lower half of the picture. The artist has kept every accident rather than tidying them away.

The eyes are the reason the piece works. Set deep in red-brown sockets under the swept plates of the brow, they are yellow, slit-pupilled and unmistakably alive, the one organic thing in a face otherwise made of ceramic and metal. Everything around them is broken, cracked and stained; the eyes are painted with precision.

Below, the mask narrows into the ribbed vertical vent that stands in for a mouth, painted in ochre and grey with a smear of dull red beneath it. Dark olive and deep purple fill the corners of the canvas, and a few violet strokes at either side suggest the shoulders without describing them.

The character was a living being before he was rebuilt around what was left, and this treatment is the correct one for that: the surface reads as damaged plating, the expression reads as pure reptilian appetite, and the two do not sit comfortably together.

Part of our Star Wars collection, next to the full figure with four blades and the duel with Kenobi.