Sith destroying a Star Destroyer — Print & Oil Painting

The whole canvas is organised around one outstretched arm. He stands in the right foreground with his back mostly to us, weight on the forward foot, the right arm reaching up and away toward the ship, fingers spread and slightly tensed. Everything the picture wants to say about cause and effect is contained in the gap between that hand and the hull above it.

The ship is coming down on a diagonal, wedge nose lifted toward the upper left, the underside and one flank turned toward us. It has already begun to break. Plating peels away along the near edge, small fragments spin off into the air around it, and the whole mass is close enough to the towers below that the outcome is not in question. It is painted grey and cold against a bruised blue sky.

Below it a city is burning. Orange fire and dark smoke boil up from the left where something has already landed, spires and gantries stand in silhouette, and a broad platform runs across the lower edge with small structures scattered over it. The scale is stated by the towers, which are dwarfed.

He himself is painted in near black: a long dark cloak thrown out behind him and lifting at the hem, a fitted dark tunic, cropped dark hair. The red blade is held down and back in the left hand, well away from the action, contributing nothing except a single hot vertical line at the right edge of the frame.

That detail is the argument of the picture. The weapon is switched on and irrelevant, because the thing being done here is being done with an open hand. From our Star Wars collection, next to a kindred figure with twin blades in the snow and another of these ships coming apart.