Dala — Folk-Painted Cartoon Horse, Town Square, Sweden

In Dalarna they have been carving and painting the same horse for about two hundred years. That is a hard thing to be asked to follow, and the town council knew it. Their brief opened with what they did not want: a giant replica.

The actual request

Something that belonged to the tradition without being a copy of it. It had to be a cartoon in its proportions, and it had to be painted by hand in the local manner, in a spot where a real kurbits painter would recognise the vocabulary.

Loosening the horse

The traditional carved horse is already an abstraction, so we had room. Our version exaggerates in the opposite direction from the carving: a bigger head, a shorter and much thicker neck, and a body that is closer to a sphere than a barrel. The legs are stumpy enough to be almost comic, and the hooves are two flat cylinders with no detail at all.

Critically, we made it shorter in the leg and longer in the muzzle than the traditional model. That single change is what stops the piece being a replica and turns it into a character standing in the same family.

Painting it properly

We engaged a kurbits painter from the region and she worked on the piece for nine days. Every motif is freehand: scrolling vines up the neck, a crown of petals and dots across the chest, leaf pairs along the flanks, a band of small circles around the hooves. The palette is the traditional one — deep red, a dense blue, cream and gold leaf on a dark ground.

The one instruction we gave her was to let the pattern expand. Traditional decoration covers a small wooden horse tightly; at 2.2 m the same density would have gone muddy, so the motifs are roughly twice the size they would normally be, with more dark ground showing between them.

In the square

It stands where the market used to be held, facing the fountain, on a plain granite plinth that was already there. The council chose not to add a plaque. Everyone in town knows what it is, and the visitors ask.