A Lone Jedi Confronts a Dragon on a Mountain Peak — Print & Oil Painting

A tall canvas, and the beast has nearly all of it. A green-blue serpent descends out of the upper left, its body thick as a tower and plated in overlapping scale with a ridge of spines running its whole length, coils once through the middle of the picture, and lays its tail across the rock in the foreground. A single dark wing spreads off the top right corner and is cut by the frame. The head hangs at centre right, frilled, horned, jaws parted on a red interior.

Behind it hangs a large pale disc, nearly white at the centre and pink at the rim, with a second one much smaller and far hotter low to the right. They are the brightest things in the image, and the artist has parked the creature's skull directly across the larger of them so the head is read as a silhouette cut out of light.

The figure is tiny. He stands on a black outcrop at the lower left with his back to us, a pale cream cloak lifting off his shoulders, and holds a blue blade out low and to the side: not raised, not braced, simply lit. That blade is about as long as one of the creature's spines. The scale of the encounter is stated by the comparison and nothing further needs saying.

The palette is unusual for the subject. Dusty mauve sky, rose-coloured mountains in the middle distance, olive in the hide of the animal, and the plasma as the only cool accent in an otherwise warm canvas. It gives the scene the temperature of a late evening rather than of a fight.

Our Star Wars collection counters it with the saga's own great serpent, painted at ground level and without wings: the krayt dragon rising out of the dunes.