General Grievous's Mask Lit by His Green Saber — Print & Oil Painting

The head fills nearly the whole sheet, turned a few degrees off square, and the artist has painted it as a damaged object rather than as a face. Every plate is scratched, chipped along the edges, greyed with grime and speckled with small orange corrosion spots, and a fine web of hairline cracks runs across the crown.

The eyes sit deep inside dark red sockets, and they are the one warm living note in the picture: two small amber discs, lit from within, ringed by raw-looking tissue. Around them the bone-coloured plating is cold and dead.

Behind the mask, to the right, the back of the head opens into machinery. Ribbed cable, a large circular joint at the neck, overlapping plates and hoses run away into shadow, and the artist keeps that region deliberately unresolved so it reads as depth rather than as detail.

A green blade enters from the lower left corner at a shallow angle and stops just short of the chin. It lights the underside of the jaw and the vertical bars of the mouth from below, throws a cool wash up one cheek, and tints the black background around it a deep bottle green. Sparks drift across the frame in orange and green flecks.

Green is the giveaway. The weapon in his hand was built by somebody else and taken, which is why the light on his own face in this picture belongs to a dead stranger. Part of our Star Wars collection, alongside another weathered close study of the same mask and the near-black version where the eyes have gone out.