Cartoon Bust — Company Founder, Pop-Art Treatment, Rotterdam

The founder retired after thirty-one years and the company wanted something other than a photograph, a clock or a bench. Their first instinct was bronze. Their second instinct, which they reached in the same meeting, was that bronze would be unbearable.

The brief

A half-length bust, about 1.7 m including the base, in the office lobby and on a plinth that could be moved to the plaza outside for events. Caricature rather than likeness — the nose and the eyebrows were named in the brief, which is how we knew the family had been consulted.

Choosing pop art

The man in question had run a printing business. That settled it. The bust is built in the language of a printed comic: flat primary colour across the jacket, a clean white shirt with two hard black lines for the collar, thick black contours around every form and a Ben-Day halftone dot screen for the shading on the face.

The halftone was the interesting problem. Printing artefacts are flat, and a bust is not. We kept the dot grid running at a constant angle across the whole piece rather than conforming it to the surface, exactly as it would if the sculpture had been photographed and printed. The shading is entirely a function of dot size — there is not one blended tone anywhere on the face.

Contours carry the likeness

With the modelling suppressed by the flat colour, the black lines had to do the work that shadow would normally do. The brow, the nostril, the line of the jaw and the break of the ear are all single black contours of around 8 mm, and their weight is deliberately uneven: heavier on the shadow side of the face, thinner where the light hits.

Build

Fibreglass over a steel core, gloss clear coat, on a low black plinth. The halftone is under the clear coat, so the flanks of the jacket, which people touch, will not wear through.

At the handover

The founder looked at it for a while and then said it looked like a screen-print of a man he used to be. The staff have since worked out that the contour of the left eyebrow is the exact angle he raises it at, which nobody has admitted to putting in the brief.