A Moss-Covered AT-ST Stands in an Overgrown Forest — Print & Oil Painting

The painting speaks the language of nineteenth century landscape almost exactly: a screen of beeches with the light coming through from behind, a stream running over pale stones across the foreground, red-brown leaf litter on the banks, and the whole scene held in a soft golden green.

Into that tradition has been inserted a war machine, and it has been treated with the same brush as the trees. The cockpit head stands high at the right, its slab sides brown with corrosion, a thick pelt of bright moss growing over the crown and down the shoulder of the hull. Both chin guns point down and slightly out, drooping rather than aiming.

The legs are where the picture makes its case. Green has climbed them from the ground up, the knee joints are furred with growth, and one foot has settled into the moss and roots at the base of a trunk so completely that it takes a moment to work out where machine stops and beech begins.

In the middle distance, in a lit clearing beyond the stream, four deer are grazing. One has raised its head, and it is looking away from the walker rather than at it. That single detail carries the whole argument: the animals have stopped counting this thing as a threat.

Two-legged walkers like this one were used for patrol work under exactly this kind of canopy, and the war they patrolled for was decided in a forest not unlike it. Part of our Star Wars collection, alongside the larger machine abandoned upright in fog and the locals who dealt with these things at close range.