T-47 airspeeders and AT AT on Hoth — Print & Oil Painting

Contrast measures under fourteen hundredths, the lowest reading in this entire group, and that number is the subject of the painting. Almost nothing here is fully dark or fully light. The whole canvas hovers in a narrow band of pale blue white, and shapes have to be inferred rather than seen.

One speeder is legible. It crosses the right half of the frame from above and behind, banking left, its grey hull carrying a red flash on the flank and two dark engine housings at the rear. Its edges are the sharpest in the image and even they are soft.

Everything to the left is guesswork resolving slowly into machinery. Two walkers stand in the fog, one nearer and one further, and what the artist gives us is a sloped head, the suggestion of a chin, and the top joints of legs disappearing downward into white. No foot touches visible ground anywhere in the picture. There is no horizon line at all.

That is what makes the piece frightening rather than merely atmospheric. The pilot in the speeder is inside the same weather we are, which means he is flying at things he can barely see, and the painting refuses to give him or us any more information than that.

Part of our Star Wars collection, alongside those walkers painted in clear air and the heavier way of going at them.