X-Wing Squadron Approaches the Death Star Above a Red World — Print & Oil Painting

The picture is built in four depths and the eye is walked through them in order. Nearest, at the lower right, an X-wing runs almost out of frame: we see it from behind and below, engine bells burning red-orange, the underside of the fuselage catching light thrown up from the planet. Behind it a second fighter banks at mid-distance. Further back a third crosses the centre with its cannons flashing. And at the top, small and grey and perfectly still, hangs the station.

The Death Star is painted without any drama at all. It occupies a fraction of the canvas in the upper right, a pale sphere with a faint equatorial line ruled across it and the round dish of the superlaser set into the upper hemisphere. No glow, no charge, nothing happening. Keeping it small and quiet is what makes it heavy.

The lower left is given over to a planet: a broad rust-red limb, cloud-banded, with a thin bright line of atmosphere along its edge. Its colour bleeds up into the black as brown nebula haze, so the fighters cross a field that is warm along the bottom and cold at the top.

All the movement runs on one diagonal, from the lower right corner up toward the station, and the three nearest fighters have been aligned along it. That is the shape of an approach rather than of a battle. The shooting has barely begun.

From our Star Wars collection, next to the squadron over a crimson planet and the Falcon's run at the same station.