AT-ATs and TIE Fighters March Into the Sunset — Print & Oil Painting

The picture is built on a mirror. A shallow flooded flat runs from the bottom edge to the middle distance, dead calm, and it repeats the entire upper half of the image upside down: the sun, the cloud, the walkers and their legs, all doubled and only slightly softened. Roughly half the canvas is reflection.

Five heavy walkers stand across the middle ground, four legged, spaced at intervals, each one a dark silhouette with no surface detail recovered at all. The sun sits low and dead centre between two of them and burns a white hole in the cloud, throwing a hard column of light down the water toward us.

Above, a dozen fighters are scattered across the sky as small black shapes, most of them the familiar bent panelled outline, three of them a heavier swept winged type. They are placed loosely and at different sizes, the way birds actually distribute, rather than in formation.

The sky is doing something the machines are not. It is worked in apricot, rose, lilac and a cold blue at the upper edges, full of broken cloud, and it is genuinely beautiful. The artist has kept every manufactured object in the frame as flat black, so the only thing with colour in it is the weather, and the only things with shape are the intruders.

Part of our Star Wars collection, beside the same walkers under a station instead of a sun and the fighters given a sunset of their own.