Grogu Peeks From Behind Misty Forest Rocks — Print & Oil Painting

A wide, soft, almost colourless canvas. A forest of thin vertical trunks stands in heavy grey mist across the whole background, painted flat and pale so that no individual tree resolves, and mossy boulders come up in overlapping masses along the bottom edge. Fine white specks drift through the air at every depth.

The child is set low and left of centre, with only his head, shoulders and one small hand clearing the top of a rock. He is turned upward and slightly back, ears held out wide and level, and his eyes are closed. The face is tilted toward something above and behind him that the picture never shows.

That closed-eyed upward tilt is the whole content of the image. Nothing in the frame is moving, nothing is approaching, and there is no incident anywhere in it. Whatever he is doing, he is doing it with his eyes shut in a wet grey wood, and the artist has declined to illustrate the result.

Colour has been drained almost to nothing, to grey-green moss, bone-grey mist and black wet branches, which makes the one deliberate exception carry real weight. At the right of the canvas a dark tangle of twigs holds a scatter of small orange buds and two open white flowers, painted crisply against all that vagueness. It is the only sharp thing in the picture and the only living colour in it.

Held in our Star Wars collection, beside the canvas among falling petals and the reach toward a blue butterfly.