A TIE Pilot's Helmet Gleams With the Imperial Crest — Print & Oil Painting

Nine tenths of this canvas is black, and not a graded black either: it is flat, opaque and closed, with no wall, no cockpit and no horizon anywhere in it. Only one canvas in the lot measures darker than this one, and everything this piece has to say is squeezed into a single lit edge.

The helmet is turned three quarters away and lit from the front right. Light runs along the ridge of the angular brow, catches the flared cheek where the jaw guard widens, and slides down the ribbed hoses that drop from the mouth to the chest. Two lenses burn a low red out of the eye recesses, and a third red glow sits lower down where the breathing gear meets the collar.

On the temple a red device has been laid in over the grey: a broken ring with a hooked stroke inside it, brushed rather than stencilled, its edges dragged and reworked so that the mark looks worn into the shell rather than applied to it.

The rest of the kit is read almost entirely by highlight. A boxed fitting with two bolt heads sits at the top of the frame, a shoulder plate steps out of the dark at the left, a broad chest harness crosses the lower corner. All of it is the same near-black, separated only by the width of a lit line.

The suit is not costume. The cockpit these men fly in has no life support of its own, so the seal at that collar is the only thing between the pilot and vacuum. Painting the helmet and leaving the man entirely unseen is the honest version of the job. Part of our Star Wars collection, alongside the view from directly behind one of these pilots in action and the most famous of them climbing into his own machine.