Obi-Wan Kenobi Meditates as His Lightsaber Hovers — Print & Oil Painting

A vertical picture built as a stack. At the bottom, a black outcrop of rock. On it, Obi-Wan, hooded, cross-legged, hands folded loosely in his lap. Above him, filling the top third of the sheet, an enormous weathered face resolved out of cloud, with a great sphere behind it whose face carries a circular dish, a shape most viewers will name before they have finished looking at it.

The saber is the detail the whole composition turns on. It is ignited and lying dead horizontal in the air in front of him, unheld, at the exact height of his folded hands. That single flat blue line crosses the full width of the canvas and cuts the picture in two, and it is the only straight edge anywhere in an image otherwise made entirely of vapour.

The palette is one colour and its absences: steel blue, blue-black, blue-white. The blade throws a cold wash up into the hood and across the knuckles, and the rest of the figure sinks into a robe painted almost as dark as the rock. His eyes are lowered and his face is entirely still: the artist has spent the light on a man who is not looking at anything.

Scattered through the mist, at every depth, are small pale fragments hanging motionless in the air: shards, plates, broken curves of metal. They are not falling. Held with the blade, they make one continuous statement about a mind holding a great many things off the ground at once.

Part of our Star Wars collection. For the same character alone in a desert instead of a cloud, see the Tatooine canvas, and for the vision of a giant face used again on a far larger scale, the Vader landscape.