Luke Skywalker black and white portrait — Print & Oil Painting

There is no colour anywhere on this canvas, and the tone has not been blended either. Every value has been cut into a flat step, so the face is built from perhaps eight discrete greys locked against one another with hard borders, in the manner of a hand-cut screen print.

It is the head of an older man and the painting does not soften anything. Deep folds run from the nose to the corners of the mouth, the brow is heavy and slightly drawn together, the grey beard is short and worked in fine separated strokes, and the hair is swept back off the forehead in loose masses that break into pure white where the light strikes.

The eyes are the only part given continuous modelling. Both are turned straight out at the viewer, level and unhurried, with a small hard catchlight in each. Everything else in the picture is a plane. Those two are wet.

Behind him is flat black, and the collar below is so dark that the head appears to sit on nothing. No robe, no weapon, no landscape, no era: strip a character this heavily costumed down to a bare face and what is left has to carry the whole story on its own.

From our Star Wars collection, beside the same greyscale treatment applied to a man who is almost never seen unmasked and a third study in the same flat monochrome, this time of something not remotely human.