Imperial AT-STs Rain Fire Over a Battlefield — Print & Oil Painting

An open heath under a flat overcast, painted in olive, dun and grey green, with scrub and low bushes running back to a distant treeline. The light is even and shadowless. It is the least theatrical landscape in this group and the fighting has been put into it without any lighting help at all.

Two walkers dominate, and both stand on two legs rather than four: a boxed command cabin carried high on a pair of long jointed limbs, with a rounded ordnance pod on the flank of the head and paired guns beneath the chin. The nearer one strides forward at the centre of the canvas with its guns firing, and the second advances at the right, half turned. A third stands smaller and paler in the left distance.

Around and beneath them, eight or nine stormtroopers advance on foot, several firing, and the artist has staggered them at very different distances so that the scale of the machines has something human to be measured against. Red bolts cross the frame on multiple axes, some outgoing and some incoming.

The most convincing passage is the leg joints. Hydraulics, pistons and cabling are worked in detail at the knee and hip of the near walker, and the metal is streaked with mud up to the shin. Whatever else this machine is, the painting insists it is a vehicle that has been driven through a field.

From our Star Wars collection, next to the same type of walker watched from inside a trench and a single soldier standing under a far larger one.