Obi-Wan Kenobi Faces Darth Vader in a Blazing Standoff — Print & Oil Painting

A wide canvas built on strict mirror symmetry, which is an unusual way to stage a duel and is the whole idea here. The two figures stand at equal distances from the centre in matching lunges, each with a blade held low and behind and the free hand thrown forward toward the other. Cover either half and the remaining one describes the same pose.

What separates them is colour and nothing else. On the left everything is blue: pale robes, white hair and beard, a blue blade, and a burst of blue-white particles thrown outward around the figure like spray off a wave. On the right everything is red: black armour and cape, a red blade, the identical burst rendered in crimson. The two energies stop short of one another and leave a gap open between them.

That gap is filled by the strangest element in the picture: a tall bank of vertical light bars, broken into segments of unequal length, burning white. The same motif is repeated twice more, tinted blue behind the left figure and red behind the right, so the composition reads as three lit panels with a fighter standing in front of two of them.

Below, the floor is dark rubble and drifting smoke with one large broken slab set centrally at the bottom edge. The handling is graphic rather than painterly throughout: hard edges, saturated light, no atmosphere between the viewer and the figures. It is built to work at a glance, and it does: two men, two colours, one wall of light between them.

Held in our Star Wars collection, beside another crossing of these two blades and a third account of the meeting.