The project Stormtrooper mourning the loss of his mother developed out of a series of water colours of different Star Wars characters in scenarios of emotional crisis. I was thinking about iconic representations of evil within popular culture that were familiar yet wholly fictitious. I was drawn to the idea of confusing this process of recognition, such that the stormtrooper is rendered vulnerable and ultimately humanised through apparent loss. The retributory image becomes curiously ironic as a creature designed to destroy is left grieving at the reality of death thrust upon him. A double irony exists in the viewer, who is then forced to empathise with a character that never existed in the first place.

This opened up other possibilities such as C3PO on his death bed. In this we witness the very endearing if fragile idea of 'human' vulnerability. I wanted to accentuate this idea of a fictitious icon tugging on our collective sympathy, such that in witnessing his last breath we complete this humanising process through our projections of association and loss. We confuse his raison d’être as the fussy android in Star Wars with the overwhelming sense of connection we have with him as something else from our own experience. The picture has a dim-lit aged quality, exacerbated by the heavy bed sheet and gothic candlestick holder that fronts the composition. I’d taken these from the painting – 'Napoleon on his death bed by the (Dutch born) French artist Ary Scheffer of 1821. It was important for me to retain this 'old masterly' quality, as a means to emphasise the speed at which C3PO already seems overly familiar and culturally dated. The scale and nature of the portrait creates an intimacy between C3PO and the onlooker and in this, like the portrait of Napoleon from which it is taken, a contradiction emerges between the reality of death and unreality of the icon as image.

Simon Willems 2010