Obi-Wan Kenobi Standing Ready in Clone Trooper Armor — Print & Oil Painting

A wide banner with a single figure in it and no incident at all. He stands at the right of the frame, turned three-quarter toward us, with the blade lit and held up beside the head in one gloved hand. The left half of the canvas is an out-of-focus wall in grey-green, and nothing happens in it.

The armour is the subject. White plastoid plates over a black undersuit: a rounded pauldron on the near shoulder, a plate over the upper arm, a segmented forearm guard, and a chest piece under the shoulder. All of it is scuffed and chipped along the edges, greyed with use, and painted with enough surface damage to read as issued kit rather than as costume. A dark red emblem is stamped across the pauldron.

Above it the face is entirely unarmoured, and the contrast is the point of the picture. Clean beard, hair swept back, brow slightly raised, the eyes tracking something to the right of the frame. He looks like a man being briefed rather than a man fighting, and the blade is up because it is prudent, not because anything has started.

The blade itself is short in the frame, a stub of blue-white leaving the top edge, and it throws no light onto the armour or the face. The painter has declined the obvious effect and kept the lighting flat and even, which leaves the drawing of the plates to carry the whole image.

A Jedi general in trooper plating is a specific and slightly uncomfortable idea: the Order supplied its commanders to an army it did not build and dressed them in that army's equipment. This painting takes the idea seriously and paints the plating as the used, dented property of a soldier. From our Star Wars collection, next to another study of the same armour and the same figure with the blade fully raised.