A Ring of Star Destroyers Orbits a Hub Station — Print & Oil Painting

The strangest composition in this group, and the most graphic. Seen from high above, dozens of Star Destroyers have been arranged nose inward around a central hub in two concentric rings, prows radiating like the teeth of a gear or the rays of a drawn sun. A slender spire rises at the centre of it. A long straight causeway crosses the whole image horizontally and cuts the wheel in half.

Beneath everything lies a pale blue surface, water or ice, textured with fine ripples, and the free ships in the lower half of the frame are pushing V shaped wakes across it. That detail settles the scene: this is not deep space but something closer to a harbour, and these vessels are moored rather than flying.

The colour is almost entirely one note. Blue grey hull, blue grey water, blue white haze on the horizon, saturation just over a third and no warm accent anywhere at all. Nothing here is on fire and nothing is under way at speed.

What the repetition does is strip the ship of its menace and replace it with something colder. Seen once, a Star Destroyer is a threat. Seen forty times, laid out on a grid with its sisters, it becomes a unit of production, and the picture starts to read as a photograph of an industry rather than of a fleet.

From our Star Wars collection, alongside a single one of them alone on open water and what this much tonnage is built to accomplish.