Onyx — Chalk-White Cartoon Labrador, Gallery Forecourt, Basel

Most of what we are asked for is colourful, and most of the time colour is doing the work. This commission was the opposite. The foundation had a forecourt, a sculpture budget and one condition: no colour at all.

The argument behind the brief

Their reasoning was blunt and, we thought, correct. A cartoon in strong colour can hide a weak silhouette. Strip the colour out and a viewer sees only the shape. If the shape is still a character, the design is honest.

So they asked for a labrador — a familiar, blocky, forgiving dog — in a single flat chalk-white matte, and about 2.4 m, so the form could be walked around.

Designing without colour

We shortened the muzzle and widened the skull until the head silhouette recognised itself from fifty metres. The chest became one broad rounded plane and the legs became cylinders with no articulation in them at all. The tail, which was the last element to work, is raised about twenty degrees. At a neutral angle the whole animal looks as though it is waiting for a command it does not want to hear.

Two rounds of the 3D were thrown out entirely because the body read as a generic herding breed. Labrador comes down to two things in silhouette: skull width and the depth of the chest behind the front legs. Everything else is negotiable.

Matte, and the reason it is hard

A matte white finish is the least forgiving surface in the trade. There is no gloss to scatter the light, so every ripple in the laminate is visible in exactly the place a viewer stands. The shell was blocked by hand through four grades, primed, blocked again, then finished in a dead-flat museum white with a UV clear coat that stays flat. There is no pattern anywhere on the piece.

What happens in daylight

The forecourt faces north-east. In the morning the white picks up the cool light off the glass and reads almost grey; by late afternoon it goes warm. The foundation reports that visitors spend longer walking around it than around the bronze inside, which is the outcome they were hoping for.