Aurelio — Fauvist Cartoon Horse, Public Garden, Arles

Arles is a town where nobody needs a lecture about colour. The brief was two lines long and the second line was the interesting one: no naturalistic colour anywhere.

The rule

The horse could be any colour except a horse colour. Not bay, not chestnut, not grey. Every surface had to be a colour that a horse has never been, and the transitions between those colours had to be visible brush strokes rather than sprayed edges.

Choosing the palette

Four colours, chosen so that the piece changes character as the light moves: a hot orange over the head and shoulders, viridian along the flank and haunch, cobalt on the legs and the underside of the neck, and magenta on the mane, tail and the line of the spine.

The difficult one was cobalt. Blue legs on a horse read as cold and slightly unpleasant until the magenta mane sits directly above them, at which point the whole thing snaps into a painting. We got to that pairing on the fourth maquette.

Painting like a painter, not like a shop

Broad visible strokes with softened edges are not easy to produce with automotive equipment, which wants to lay down an even film. These were applied with large brushes in a slow-drying single-stage paint, worked wet into wet so the colours blend for a centimetre or so at each boundary, then sealed under a satin clear coat that keeps the brush texture legible without adding glare.

You can still read the direction of every stroke. It is the only piece we have made where the surface finish is the artwork and the sculpture is the support.

In the garden

It stands between two plane trees on the main cross path, where it is seen at an angle for most of the day and head-on only in the late afternoon. The municipal arts office reports a running argument in the local paper about whether the blue legs are a mistake. They are not.