The Millennium Falcon Leaves Cloud City as Lando Gives Chase — Print & Oil Painting

The ship is moving left and has almost cleared the frame, and the artist has allowed it to: the forward mandibles are nearly at the edge, and there is far more empty air behind her than in front. This is a painting about departure, composed so the eye follows the hull straight out of the picture.

She is seen slightly from below and side on, the hull chalk-white and grey with dark red flashes along the spine, the cockpit tube slung out to the right, the dish standing proud behind it. Plating is described across the whole length. At the stern the drive is lit, and it is the one cold thing in the canvas: a hard cyan-white bar of exhaust flaring back and up, throwing a faint blue cast onto the metal around it.

Everything else runs warm and thick. The air is loaded with dust and pale cloud, and the towers and spires of the city rise on the right in bleached silhouette with a landing platform cantilevered out beneath them. Every reading here comes back warm and high in key, and visibility is poor enough that the far structures amount to little more than tone.

On that platform, small and put in with a few strokes, three figures are caught mid-movement: one running forward, one further back with an arm raised, thin red bolts leaving in the direction of the ship. None of it is going to work, and the picture is honest about that: the pursuit is a few inches of activity at the right-hand edge of a canvas the ship has already crossed.

In our Star Wars collection you will also find those same spires flown through at speed and the view from inside her cockpit.