The Empire's Crest Glows Blood Red — Print & Oil Painting

The only piece in this group with no depth, no light source and no scene: a single mark, centred, on a black square. The measured contrast is close to a twentieth, lower than anything else here by a wide margin, and the practical effect is that the emblem does not announce itself. It surfaces.

The design is a cog. A solid disc at the centre, eight blunt spokes radiating out from it, and around them a broken ring interrupted at regular intervals, with the gaps aligned to the spaces between the spokes. It is perfectly symmetrical about both axes, it can be cut as a single stencil, and it works at any size. That is not decoration. That is a mark drawn to be stamped on a hull, a shoulder plate, a form and a flag without ever needing to be redrawn.

What the artist has added is decay. The red is not flat: it is laid in like a wash, pooling darker at some edges, thinning to almost nothing at others, blotched with lighter patches through the upper right and worn away toward the outer ring. The black beneath shows through everywhere. It reads as paint on metal that has been out in the weather.

The colour sits between oxide and dried blood rather than at any bright red, and against the near black ground it barely separates. You have to look for a moment before the shape resolves, which is an unusual choice for an emblem and a very good one for this particular emblem.

Part of our Star Wars collection, beside a trooper posed in front of the same mark in white and the rival sigil rendered in embers.