Rey Walks With a Red Saber as Vader's Shadow Looms — Print & Oil Painting

The colour has been drained out of everything except one line. Grey rock, grey mist, grey robes, ash falling in flakes, and through the middle of it a red blade running from the lower left corner to the upper right, lit at both ends because the weapon is double bladed and she holds it at the centre.

She crosses the frame at walking pace in a plain hooded cloak and wrapped cream robes, hem and cape snapping backward with the movement, hair pulled into two tight knots. Her face is turned back over her shoulder toward us: pale, marked with red across the cheek, and the visible eye is a hot yellow.

Behind her the fog holds a shape about four times her height, a dark formation whose silhouette resolves, once you have seen it, into a helmet: the flare of the cheek panels, the dome of the crown, the suggestion of a grille. It is never stated and it is never quite deniable.

The ground is a slope of broken stone with chips of it hanging in the air around her feet, so the whole picture sits in the half second after something has been disturbed and before it falls. The handling is photographic, with real depth of field and a soft focus on the rocks nearest the viewer.

The final film gives her a vision of precisely this, a version of herself with a folding double blade and yellow eyes, and the piece stages it as a walk rather than as a fight, which is worse. Part of our Star Wars collection, beside the duel on the ruined battle station and the same wreckage painted in daylight.