TIE Fighters and X-Wings Clash Above the Scarif Shoreline — Print & Oil Painting

An extremely wide panorama, and the artist uses the proportion as a survey. Read it left to right and it works like a map: burning palms and an orange fireball at the far left, then shallows crowded with infantry, then the walkers, then open sand, then more troops, then palms again at the right edge.

The water is what makes it. A broad band of pale turquoise runs the whole width of the canvas, so shallow that every figure standing in it is reflected and every impact throws up a white plume. Stormtroopers wade through it in white, rebels in olive and tan, and at this scale the fighting reads as dozens of small separate incidents rather than one event.

Above the waterline the air is busy. TIE fighters cross in both directions, X-wings and a heavier transport bank between them, and at the upper left one craft is going down trailing black smoke in a long curve. Two AT-ATs stand in the shallows with fire at their feet.

The key is very high throughout: bright sky, bleached sand, pale water, thin cloud. Nothing is dramatised by darkness, and the violence has to compete with a perfectly pleasant tropical afternoon, which, in a picture about a battle fought on a beach resort of a planet, is exactly the right decision.

From our Star Wars collection, beside the ground-level view from the berm and the transport down on the same shore.