Grogu Standing With Arms Outstretched on Rocky Ground — Print & Oil Painting

The gesture is deliberately unreadable. Both arms are held out level with the shoulders, elbows soft, palms turned up and the fingers open, and it could equally be a shrug, a greeting, or the first instant of lifting something heavy. The face gives nothing away either.

Light enters low and from the front, which is what makes the picture unusual. It runs gold along the underside of the jaw, up the front of every fold in the robe, and straight through the thin edges of both ears until they glow coral. The crown of the head, by contrast, stays in shadow. He is lit like a figure standing over a fire.

The ground takes everything else. Dark churned earth in brown and near-black, stippled with a dry brush across the whole canvas, pale grey stones dropped over it at intervals and a larger one broken open at the lower left. There is no horizon and no sky, so the surface tilts up flat behind him and he seems to be seen slightly from above.

His robe is the pale sand-coloured wrap, sleeves rolled into thick cuffs at the wrist, hem cut off by the bottom edge of the frame. Between the dark ground and the warm figure there is almost no middle value anywhere, which is why so small a shape can hold so large a canvas.

Part of our Star Wars collection, beside the pair of them out under a blazing sun and the two of them in the dust with the shooting already started.