Millennium Falcon Flees a Lone TIE Fighter in Dust — Print & Oil Painting

The real subject of this canvas is dust. Sand-coloured atmosphere fills the entire frame, whipped into a slow visible vortex that spirals out from a pale sun high on the left, and everything else in the picture is either inside that dust or made out of it. There is no sky, no ground and no horizon anywhere.

The Falcon comes through it hard, banking, seen from below and ahead. The artist has caught the hull at the angle that shows off its geometry best: the two forward mandibles reaching down to the lower left, the round cockpit tube slung off the starboard side, the dish standing proud on the upper plating, and the whole disc raked back so the engine end is furthest away. The plating is painted greyish-white and covered in panel lines, patches and grime, a ship built out of repairs.

Two green bolts leave the underside gun and streak away to the left. Following them takes the eye to the only other machine in the picture: a single TIE fighter, small, deep in the haze, its twin hexagonal panels reduced to thin grey rectangles and the ball cockpit to a smudge. It is much further away than it first appears, and the dust has taken most of it.

Holding almost the whole image inside one narrow band of ochre and cream is what makes it work. There is no colour contrast to lean on, so depth is carried purely by edge sharpness: crisp on the near hull, soft on the far fighter, gone entirely at the edges of the frame.

Kept in our Star Wars collection, where the dunes at sunset shows this ship at rest and the X-wing canvas gives it an escort.