Inside a TIE Fighter Cockpit During a Firefight — Print & Oil Painting

We are strapped in behind the pilot, close enough to read the crest stencilled on the back of his helmet: a clean white cog, sharp-edged and perfectly centred, the one crisp graphic in an otherwise soft picture.

The cockpit is built as a cage of hexagons. Heavy frames run over the crown of the canopy and out to both sides, the panes between them are slightly milky, and the near frame is close enough to be out of focus. At the lower right a console steps up into the corner with red and green indicator lamps burning along it and a control yoke rising in front of the seat.

The pilot fills the middle of the frame as a dark mass. Two thick ribbed hoses loop down from his jaw and disappear into the chest rig, the shoulders are squared, the head is level. He does not turn, and no part of his face is available to us at any point.

Through the glass the battle is small and far away. Two more fighters hold station off the starboard side, one high and one low, and beneath them a flat plain carries a single orange fireball with three columns of smoke leaning off it toward a line of industrial structures at the horizon. The scale of that fight, seen from up here, is roughly the size of a thumbnail.

The whole image has been pulled toward brown and sepia, as though it were a photograph recovered from an archive rather than a painting. It suits the subject: these machines carry no hyperdrive at all, so a fight above a planet means a capital ship is waiting somewhere overhead to take them home. From our Star Wars collection, next to the same helmet painted alone in near total darkness and a flight of them crossing a desert sunset.