Master Yoda's Weathered Face Rendered in Warm Tones — Print & Oil Painting

A square portrait handled as a wash drawing rather than as an oil: thin transparent colour, a great deal of exposed ground, dry brush dragged across the ears and the crown, and loose scratched pencil marks left visible round the edges where the artist was still finding the shape. In places the paint has been allowed to run and spatter, and none of it has been tidied away.

The head is centred and frontal and fills most of the canvas. Every wrinkle is given: three deep furrows across the dome, the heavy folds bracketing the mouth, the loose skin of the throat, the fine creases fanning from the corners of the eyes. The ears reach almost to the left and right edges and thin to translucency at their tips, where the background shows straight through them.

The eyes are the exception to all that looseness. They are painted small, dark and wet, with one point of light in each, and they are aimed slightly to the side rather than at the viewer. Nothing else in the face is doing anything: no snarl, no grin, no raised brow. It is a portrait of a very old person not performing for anybody.

Colour stays warm and narrow: olive and moss in the skin, rust and burnt sienna in the robe, and a cream-and-grey ground that dissolves into smoke at the corners. The measured light level is the highest of any figure study in this group, and the result sits nearer to a life drawing than to a poster.

Our Star Wars collection sets it near the meditation study and the pair of them sitting before a fire.