Luke Skywalker against AT AT on Hoth — Print & Oil Painting

The sky takes two thirds of the canvas and carries the whole painting. Black storm cloud crowds in from the left, a torn gold opening burns at the centre right, and shafts of light drop through the gap onto the snow in long visible bars.

Three walkers occupy three different distances. The nearest strides across a field of boulders at the left with its head lowered and enough detail on it to read the chin gun and the knee joints. A second stands smaller at the centre right. A third is barely a mark on the horizon. All are painted as flat dark silhouettes, because at that scale nothing else would be honest.

The man is on top of a boulder in the middle of the frame at perhaps a hundredth of the height of the canvas, with a single hot point of blue-green light beside him. Cover that point of light and he disappears entirely. It is the smallest and most important mark on the whole surface.

The foreground is a scatter of rounded snow-capped boulders with cold blue shadows pooling between them, and behind those a flat white plain running out to a low ridge. Fine snow and dark specks of debris drift across everything, softening the middle distance without ever obscuring the near rock.

The arrangement is the oldest one in landscape painting: enormous weather, enormous machines, and one lit human being who has decided not to leave. From our Star Wars collection, beside the same walkers crossing open snow and the fighters that came down to take them on.