Maz Kanata Standing Amid a Crowded Cantina — Print & Oil Painting

The picture is built on a sharp fall-off in focus. Maz fills the middle of the frame from the shoulders up, rendered to the last crease, and the room behind her softens steadily with distance until the furthest patrons are little more than coloured shapes under a stone arch.

The head is the achievement. It is deliberately oversized, and the wrinkles covering it follow the muscle rather than merely decorating the surface: they radiate from the corners of the mouth, gather in bands across the brow, and loop around both eye sockets. The skin is a warm orange-tan worked in dozens of small strokes, and the two brown eyes sit wide and slightly lidded. She is faintly amused.

Her goggles are pushed up off her face and rest on the crown, big round lenses in a metal frame at the temples with the band running behind the head. That detail matters: the picture shows the eyes she actually has rather than the enormous ones the lenses give her. Below, a ribbed teal sweater under a grey quilted gilet, a string of dark wooden beads at the throat, and a stack of heavy metal cuffs on the wrist of the raised hand.

That hand is up beside her face with the index finger extended and the rest curled, the gesture of somebody halfway through making a point. Behind her a lantern throws warm yellow from the upper left and the room carries on without her: a hunched alien with facial tendrils at the far left, a bald man behind a counter, a hooded figure in blue, a heavy pink-brown creature at a table on the right, several patrons on benches. Not one of them is looking her way.

She has been running rooms like this one for a very long time, long enough to have known at least one smuggler far longer than he tends to admit, and the painting sets her in the middle of a crowd that stopped finding her remarkable years ago. Measured saturation is barely over a third, which is why the orange of her skin carries the entire canvas. From our Star Wars collection, alongside another hard customer sat in a dim cantina and the crew she keeps letting back through the door.