Obi Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker and Ahsoka Tano — Print & Oil Painting

Painted in the flat idiom of the animated series: clean contour lines, colour laid in unmodulated blocks, faces built from a few hard planes and almost no rendering. Three figures are stacked across the frame: Obi-Wan high on the left, Ahsoka low and central, Anakin on the right. The arrangement forms a shallow triangle with the youngest of the three at its point.

Ahsoka is the reason the composition works. She is painted smaller than either man and pushed nearest the viewer, jaw set, brows down, the white facial markings across her cheeks carrying more graphic weight than either adult face. A blade runs level across the bottom of the picture from her outstretched hand, and Obi-Wan answers it with a second blade angled up through the left margin. Between the two of them the lower half of the canvas is fenced off in blue.

Anakin has no weapon in his hands at all. His right arm is thrown out wide to the edge of the frame, fingers open, palm forward. The gesture is thrown across the whole group rather than at any target, and it is the only thing in the painting doing something that a blade cannot.

The battle behind them is kept deliberately thin: a dusty tan sky, a rank of battle droids on the right, clone troopers on the left, red bolts crossing at shallow angles, the hull of a vehicle sliding out of the bottom corner and starfighters small against the horizon. All of it is painted lighter and flatter than the three foreground figures, which is how a picture with this much going on stays legible.

Part of our Star Wars collection, next to the master and apprentice standing together and the two Jedi drawing their sabers.