Obi-Wan Kenobi Watches Tatooine's Twin Suns Set — Print & Oil Painting

Here the figure gives up the frame almost entirely. Obi-Wan stands on a rock outcrop at the far left, robes hanging heavy and torn at the hem, and the remaining four-fifths of the canvas is nothing but sky, haze and the suggestion of a settlement dissolving into the distance.

The twin suns do the composition's work. They sit low on the right, one larger and paler, one smaller and deeper gold, and they are the brightest points in an image built almost entirely from amber and burnt sienna. The eye goes to them first, then travels left across the empty middle to find the man — which is the correct order, and the reason the emptiness is not a flaw.

Everything is painted wet and loose. The rock beneath him is a few confident dark strokes; the haze is laid in translucent veils; the distant domes are barely more than a smudge. Only the silhouette of the figure is drawn with any precision, and even that stays soft at the edges.

It is a landscape that happens to contain a character rather than a portrait that happens to have a background. Part of our Star Wars collection — for the same desert at conversational distance, see the hooded close portrait.