A Planet Fracturing Into Molten Fragments in Space — Print & Oil Painting

The most extreme measurements in this group sit on the same canvas. Brightness runs under a tenth of full, the lowest of the fifty, while saturation runs to four fifths, the highest. Almost all of the picture is black, and the small part that is not is incandescent.

A world hangs slightly right of centre, lit weakly along its upper left limb by something far away. Its surface is a cold grey-brown, cratered and dull, and across the upper right quadrant it has come apart. The crust is split into a web of glowing orange fissures that spread down and around the curve like cracks in cooling slag, brightest where they are widest.

Four fragments have already left. They drift off to the right at different sizes and angles, their outer faces still dark and stony, their broken inner faces blazing white-orange where the interior is exposed. The gap between them and the planet is small, which dates the event precisely: this has just happened, and the pieces have not yet had time to go anywhere.

Everything else is empty. Deep navy black, a scatter of small stars, one faint drift of dust low on the left. There is no ship, no weapon and no beam anywhere in the frame, and no witness of any kind. The picture shows the result and withholds the cause entirely.

That restraint is what makes it work. A galaxy that has built machines capable of doing this has also produced a great many paintings of the machines, and this one declines to include them and paints the planet instead. Part of our Star Wars collection, alongside the superlaser converging in deep space and a fleet doing the same work more slowly.