A Porg Lurking Beneath a Swimmer, Jaws Style — Print & Oil Painting

The composition is borrowed wholesale from a famous film poster and the joke depends on you recognising it. A narrow strip of pale surface water runs across the top, a lone swimmer stretched out along it in warm tan, small and unaware, arms forward. Below, filling two thirds of the canvas, something enormous rises out of the deep toward her.

What rises is a porg. Round head, blue-grey and cream feathering, a pale bib down the throat, an orange-yellow beak opened wide, and two enormous black eyes with a single white catchlight in each. The painter has kept the face entirely benign. It is not snarling and it has no teeth. It is doing the only expression the species has, and the picture has simply scaled it up to the size of a whale.

The water is handled properly, which is what saves the gag from being thin. It grades from near white at the surface through pale aqua into a deep saturated teal at the bottom corners, the light falls off with depth exactly as it should, and the bird is painted slightly cooler and softer than it would be in air, as though seen through several metres of it.

Measured saturation runs past six tenths, high for this collection, and it is nearly all in that one blue. There is no second colour anywhere except the swimmer and the beak, which sit at opposite ends of the canvas and pull the eye up and down between them.

The species is the point of the joke. These are small seabirds from a wet island at the far end of nowhere, roughly the size of a cat, notable mainly for being underfoot and for staring. Nothing in the galaxy is less equipped to be the shark. From our Star Wars collection, beside the same birds at their actual size on those cliffs and the man who shared the island with them.