Tusken Raiders Watch a Krayt Dragon Rise From the Sand — Print & Oil Painting

The animal has barely been painted. It rises through the upper two thirds of the frame as a column of airborne sand with a shape somewhere inside it: a blunt armoured skull, a row of dark spines along the back, one foreleg braced. Every contour is eaten by the dust, and the artist has refused to sharpen a single edge.

Everything solid in the picture is human, and it sits along the bottom. Three robed figures stand with their backs to us, hoods up, wrapped in layered desert cloth. The one at the right has an arm raised over his head holding a long staff. They are not running.

A bantha stands at the left edge, shaggy to the ground, its huge spiral horn curling forward past the jaw, with a second animal crowding behind it. The wool is worked in thick vertical strokes that match the falling sand, so the beast and the weather are made of the same paint.

The light is entirely behind the subject. It turns the whole canvas one temperature, a hot gold that fills the air and flattens the trees at the left into pale scribbles, and it leaves the foreground figures as warm silhouettes with almost no detail on them at all.

These are the people of that desert rather than visitors to it, and the relationship shown here is closer to husbandry than to hunting: the tribe took the meat, the hide and the pearl once the animal was down. From our Star Wars collection, alongside the same creature caught head on and much closer and a single rider high on a bantha in open sun.