Obi-Wan Kenobi Grips His Saber Amid the Battle Smoke — Print & Oil Painting

A tight portrait, cropped at the belt, with both ends of the action deliberately cut away: the blade leaves the top left corner before you can judge its length, and the battle leaves the frame in every other direction. What remains is a face and two hands.

The likeness is worked to a photographic finish: copper-brown hair swept back off the forehead, the beard clipped close along the jaw and fuller at the chin, fine lines at the outer corner of the eye, a slight flush across the cheekbone. He is looking neither at the viewer nor at his weapon. The eyes are levelled off to the right at something outside the picture, and the head is set a little forward on the neck.

The hands say more than the face does. One is closed high on a ridged silver hilt, wrist cocked, holding the blade up and away from the body rather than out in front of it. The other reaches down and across to the right, the arm nearly straight, fingers spread and the palm turned toward the ground. That is not a fighting gesture. It is what somebody does to keep other people back.

Behind him the sky is one continuous red-brown thick with smoke, and thin dark bolts cross it at shallow angles. Something lies broken in the lower left, too dark to name. Against all that heat the robes stay cream and unbleached, and the blue at the very edge of the frame is the last cool note in the canvas.

Our Star Wars collection carries the same stance painted at full length and a later study of that open hand.