The Force - Provenance

The commission:

To design and build a cue that Darth Vader would have ordered for himself.

For a year and a half I researched Darth Vader and struggled with a design. I knew I would use black and white to depict good and evil, but also knew I did not want to use Darth Vader’s physical appearance in the cue.

Normally, if someone approached me with a request to do a design from the “Dark Side”, I would turn down the commission – in that it just wasn’t my way. Religious beliefs aside, I do not like to delve into negative thought processes. In this case I knew just enough about the character Darth Vader to know that he was born good, switched over to evil and then died good. That was enough for me to concentrate on the battle between good and evil – so long as good won out.

A year or two before I was approached with this commission, I had an opportunity to buy a rare wood species called Birdseye ebony. The black and white (tan) configuration of the wood was a natural for this project. It absolutely reminds me of outer space.

Everything I designed into the cue is symbolic of something involved in the Darth Vader persona: