The Grand Inquisitor Ignites His Crimson Lightsaber — Print & Oil Painting

A standing figure with a single line drawn across him. The blade enters at the bottom left corner and leaves at the top right, passing directly over the chest, and it is the only continuous stroke in a picture otherwise built from blocks of near-black. Everything the composition achieves, it achieves by holding that one diagonal against a strictly vertical figure.

He is not moving. Feet planted, shoulders square, the circular hilt held low and loose at hip height. The blade is lit but the man is at rest, which is a far less common way to paint him than mid-strike. The armour is matte black throughout: a ribbed yoke across the shoulders, a segmented panel down the torso, a plain belt, gloves to the wrist. A small cog badge sits on one shoulder.

The head is where the colour goes. Pau'an skin, chalk-white and drawn tight over a long skull; the eyes ringed in black and lit yellow; two red tracks running from the hairline down through the brows onto the cheeks, with shorter marks above them. Against all that black the face reads as something set on top of the uniform rather than grown out of it.

Behind him the wall is oxblood and charcoal, with the Imperial cog painted into the lower right, large and dark and half dissolved into the ground. In the upper left corner a second face bleeds through the murk, most of it lost, one eye still catching light, and the picture offers no account of it whatsoever.

Our Star Wars collection carries the version with the orange blade and the same hilt opened out and spinning.