Fresco Cartoon Veteran — Memorial Garden, Hexham

A town council wanted a figure for a memorial garden that is also a public garden: the kind of place where people eat lunch and children run through, and where a traditional memorial would be in the way.

A painting that stayed outdoors

The finish is a weathered wall fresco: a pale lime-plaster ground with flat unshaded areas of ochre, terracotta and olive with slightly irregular boundaries and no modelling inside them, and a scatter of flaked losses where the pale ground shows through. The figure is the veteran at 1.8 m, in a simplified field uniform with the helmet under one hand.

Making paint look like it is going

A fresco looks old because the pigment has bonded with the lime and then been partly lost, and because the plaster has come away in irregular islands around the edges of the picture. Those losses are the hard part. Each loss was routed as a shallow area about 1.2 mm deep with an irregular boundary, primed in pale grey and flatted matte, so that it reads as exposed ground rather than as a hole. Read as a hole and the piece looks damaged; read as bare ground and it looks old, and the difference is entirely in whether the edge casts a shadow.

Why it is not sombre

The palette is warm and the figure is standing easily, one hand on the helmet at the hip, looking off to the side rather than down. The council’s brief was that children should run past it without being told to be quiet, and the only way to achieve that is to make the piece worth looking at for reasons that have nothing to do with what it commemorates.

In the garden

It stands at 1.8 m at the far end of the lawn, past the benches, where it is found rather than placed on the way in. The council’s note on the first summer is in the panel above.