A Stormtrooper Piloting a Snowspeeder Above the Clouds — Print & Oil Painting

Two thirds of this canvas is deliberately empty. A graded blue sky above, a white featureless plain below, and no horizon line drawn between them: the two simply meet in a band of haze. One grey machine crosses the middle of it, and that is the entire picture.

The craft is worth the space. A long wedge hull with a raised spine, two slim prongs reaching forward past the nose, swept fins at the tail and one broad blade of a stabiliser below. The surface is matt and chalky, panel seams and fastener lines picked out in slightly darker grey, with a black heraldic device stencilled on the flank. It has the look of a working vehicle rather than of a hero prop.

The pilot rides high and completely exposed at the rear in standard white plate, both arms forward on the controls, upper body tipped into the direction of travel. There is no canopy, no screen and no visible restraint. He is riding this thing rather than flying it.

Underneath the hull a faint dark smear on the white is the only element fixing its height above the surface. Speed is conveyed by nothing at all: no blur, no vapour, no banking, no wake. It is a study of a machine holding a straight line, which is a much harder picture to make interesting than a crash.

The armour is the mass-produced pattern worn by hundreds of thousands of interchangeable men, and the artist has kept the machine every bit as anonymous as its rider. Part of our Star Wars collection, alongside the speeders the other side flew, down among the walkers and the same armour posed against an Imperial emblem.