An Incinerator Stormtrooper Armed With a Flamethrower — Print & Oil Painting

A strict profile, lit hard from the left, with the background dissolved into a blue-grey blur of pipework and platform edges. The staging belongs to an equipment photograph rather than to a battle scene: the subject is turned to show the kit, and the kit is what has been studied.

Red is applied to white in flat hard bands with nothing transitional between them: over the dome of the helmet, across the brow, around the mouth vent and down the ribs, upper arms and thighs. The white beneath is not clean white but a warm bone, scuffed at the edges where the plates meet.

The rig gets the detail. A frame on the back carries two black cylinders in a cradle, and a pair of looped hoses runs up over the shoulder and down the length of the arm to the weapon: a squat black projector with a wide muzzle, a pilot nozzle at the tip and a heavy grip beneath. Every hose is traced from end to end. The plumbing has been given the same attention as the man.

Both hands are on the weapon, the muzzle angled down and forward, the head level, the stride unhurried. Nothing has been fired. The picture is entirely about a capability that has not yet been used, which is a colder proposition than flame would have been.

Units carrying this equipment belong to the stories set after the war rather than during it, out at the edges of the galaxy where the Empire is holding ground it already took. From our Star Wars collection, beside a flamethrower fired from the back of a dewback and a death trooper shooting among snow-capped mountains.