Cartoon Bust — Founding Partner, Faux-Marble Treatment, Singapore

Firms like this one have busts. It is what they do, and the sculpture budget usually goes to a marble commission that takes two years and satisfies nobody under fifty.

What they actually wanted

A bust of the founding partner, in the plaza outside the Singapore office, at about 1.9 m, that would read as a serious object from the road and as a clearly caricatured one from three metres. In their words: traditional from far away, human up close.

Faux marble, not marble

So it is painted to look carved. A creamy white ground with soft grey and warm umber veining, polished to a high gloss, with the vest, the tie knot and the collar cut as crisp shallow relief and the head modelled in exaggerated cartoon proportions — a large head, a strong jaw, a heavier brow than the man has, spectacles simplified into two thin ellipses.

The veining was the exacting part. It has to flow through the form rather than across it. Ours runs down the shoulders and gathers under the chin the way an actual block would, because we painted it from a scan of a real piece of Carrara and mapped the vein directions onto the geometry of the bust before laying any paint.

Why not real stone? Weight, cost and safety. A marble bust of this size is upwards of a tonne, needs a structural plinth and needs a crane every time it moves. This one is roughly 90 kg and two people can walk it on a trolley.

The one joke

There is exactly one element of caricature in the whole piece beyond the proportions: the spectacles are a fraction too wide, and their left arm sits slightly higher than the right, which is how he actually wears them. Every partner who has seen it has noticed this within a minute, and none of the clients ever will.

In the plaza

It stands on a low granite plinth at the corner of the plaza, under a canopy of frangipani, with the reflectivity of the gloss reading much stronger in Singapore’s light than it did in our workshop. In practice that means the veining almost disappears at noon and returns in full at six in the evening.