Obi-Wan Kenobi Standing on a Tatooine Ridge at Sunset — Print & Oil Painting

A tall narrow canvas, and the figure has been given nearly all of it. He stands full length on a low shelf of broken rock that occupies only the bottom fifth of the frame, and everything above and around him is sky.

That sky is a single burning gradient with no sun in it, no cloud and no horizon line: pale gold immediately behind his head, deepening outward through amber into a dull scorched brown at the corners. The measured saturation runs past three-quarters, which for a picture containing one man and some rocks is remarkable, and it is the reason the image works at any size.

He is dressed in layers and the artist has painted every one of them. A heavy outer cloak in dark brown falls from the shoulders to the ground with the hood pushed back and empty behind his neck. Under it the tunic and tabards are pale sand, crossed and belted with a plain leather strap, and the lower robe drops in long vertical folds broken by the wind at the hem.

The right hand holds the hilt down at his side. It is unlit, plain silver, held loosely with the emitter pointing at the ground, and it is small enough in the frame to be missed on a first pass.

The face carries the picture. Bare head, hair pushed back, the beard shot through with lighter hairs, the brows level and the eyes turned slightly off to the left at something out of frame. He is not braced and not grieving. He is simply standing on a rock at the end of a day, which given how much of his life was spent waiting in a desert is the truest thing the painting could have chosen to show. Part of our Star Wars collection, next to the same man watching the suns go down and the hooded portrait in shadow.