Old Obi-Wan Kenobi Clashes Again with Darth Maul — Print & Oil Painting

Two figures, close, at night in the desert, and the composition is a single crossing of lines. Obi-Wan holds the right of the frame in profile, both hands closed on his hilt with the blade lit vertically in front of his face. Maul comes in from the left, low and forward, with a long double-ended hilt held across his body so that one red blade runs down to the lower left corner and the other runs up past Obi-Wan's shoulder.

The two men have been painted as opposites in every respect the artist could manage. Obi-Wan is white-haired, still, upright, his weight settled, in pale sun-bleached robes; his face is calm to the point of being blank. Maul is red and black, crouched, muscles corded in his bare arms, mouth slightly open, the yellow eyes fixed. One of them is braced and one of them is springing.

Colour follows the same split. The blue-white blade throws a cool light up the near side of Obi-Wan's beard and robe; the red blades wash the sand around Maul in a dull rose. Between the two lights the ground stays grey.

Behind them the sky is a deep night blue, thick with stars, with a few reddish clouds low down and a black rock mass rising at the left edge. The desert below is empty in every direction.

This is an argument that began decades earlier and has outlived almost everyone involved in it, which is why the artist has painted it small and quiet rather than as a spectacle: two old enemies in an empty place, and only one of them still looks like a young man. Part of our Star Wars collection, next to another night duel between the two and the moment immediately afterwards.