Obi-Wan Kenobi Deflecting a Storm of Blaster Bolts — Print & Oil Painting

Roughly a dozen blasters are hanging in the air around him, and not one of them is in a hand. Rifles and pistols float at every angle across the full width of the canvas, some level, some tipped nose down, several still firing, and the red bolts leaving them travel in directions that have nothing to do with each other. The weapons have been taken away from their owners and left where they were.

He stands in the centre with both arms stretched wide and the palms open and empty. The head is tilted slightly back, the robes are pulled taut across the chest by the movement, and the outer cloak flares out behind him to the right. It is a posture of holding rather than of striking, and it is completely still while everything around it is not.

His own weapon is on the floor. The hilt lies in the lower centre of the frame, at his feet, close enough to the front edge that it is one of the sharpest objects in the picture. Putting it there is the whole idea: he has set the blade down and is doing this with his hands.

The setting is a wet grey industrial deck under a heavy sky. Two figures crouch at the middle left, a fair-haired young man in pale cloth and a second man in a dark vest, both armed and both clearly behind him rather than beside him. White-armoured troopers lie fallen in the foreground corners. High on his chest there is an irregular red stain spreading through the tunic, the only warm passage anywhere on the figure, and the artist has not drawn attention to it in any other way.

Measured saturation sits at about a sixth, so the red of the bolts and the red of that stain are the only colour in the frame and they rhyme whether the viewer notices or not. Part of our Star Wars collection, alongside the same old man standing over fallen troopers and the young one doing it the ordinary way.