Thrawn Standing Before an Ominous Shadow — Print & Oil Painting

The most rigidly symmetrical picture in this group and also the brightest. The head sits on the vertical centre line, the shoulders are square to us, and whatever is behind him has been arranged so that its left and right halves answer each other almost exactly. Brightness measures well past half, which in a set of paintings this dark is itself a statement.

The shape behind is the reason to look twice. A dark green-black form rises out of the lower corners and sends two long hooked arms up and inward above his shoulders, curling toward each other over his head without meeting. Read one way they are horns. Read another they are claws, or the folded limbs of something much larger standing directly behind him. The painter has left it unresolved and has kept it soft-edged, so it never quite becomes an object.

Behind that again, pale vertical streaks run the full height of the canvas like light coming through a slatted screen, and they are what make the figure bright. He is standing in front of the only illuminated thing in the room, which throws his outline forward and puts the dark shape into the middle distance between the two.

He himself is painted plainly: white tunic, gold bars at the shoulders, the rank plaque of coloured squares at the chest, hands out of frame. Saturation reads barely above a tenth, the flattest of any Thrawn study here, so the small block of blue, red and yellow at his chest and the red of the eyes are the only colour events on the canvas.

The composition makes an argument that the picture never spells out: the man in front is small, tidy and entirely still, and the thing arranged around him is enormous and unnamed. From our Star Wars collection, next to the seated portrait flanked by two of his own people and the version dressed as a nineteenth century admiral.