An X-Wing Dives Over Snowy Peaks Under TIE Fire — Print & Oil Painting

Very little in this picture is dark, which is a strange decision for a painting about being shot at. It is the brightest measured canvas in the lot: an overcast sky the colour of paper, a snowfield below it in the same value, and a horizon that never quite declares itself between the two.

The fighter supplies the only solid mass. It comes down and to the left with the foils locked open, hull charcoal grey and striped along the spine and the wing edges in rust orange, the four engine intakes split into upper and lower halves, the cannon tips reaching out to all four corners of a tall frame. Against so much white it reads almost as a cut-out.

Four green bolts run in from the upper right on exactly parallel lines, thin and hard, and not one of them is touching anything. Two black fighters sit back in the cloud at the top of the frame, the nearer one turned enough to show it is still firing. The threat is entirely above and behind.

Underneath, the country is worked in the palest blues available: glaciated ridges, a valley floor scoured smooth, rock breaking through the snow in dark flecks at the lower left. The vertical format leaves a great deal of sky above the ship and a great deal of ice below it, and that emptiness is the reason the dive reads as fast.

Those coloured flashes are squadron markings rather than decoration: pilots flying identical hulls in poor visibility need some way to tell each other apart, and this is exactly the weather that argument was built for. Part of our Star Wars collection, next to the moment one of these attacks actually connects and the same cold light with walkers on the ground below.