Robbie impresses with exceptional bronze sculptures

PLETTENBERG BAY NEWS - For sculptor Robbie Leggat, The Vicious Circle represents the culmination of a life-long passion for sculpting.

The bronze sculpture of lions fighting with hyena, that was created at his foundry west of Plettenberg Bay, has art experts raving.

His dolphin sculptures in Plettenberg Bay are also icons in the town. Years of hard work and dedication, not to mention battling dyslexia, has seen his art reach a level that one of his benefactors, Lady Annabelle Conyngham, describes as 'world class'.

And Lady Conyngham, as she is affectionately known in Plettenberg Bay, should know. She assisted at Leggat's first international sale at Christie's in London in 1998 when his sculpture Hippo Water Feature was auctioned.

Robbie is a quiet, unassuming but intense artist and will soon again be the artist-in-residence at Lion Sands Game Reserve bordering the Kruger National Park, where he found the inspiration for The Vicious Circle.

Sculpting journey

His passion started on the day he drew a picture of a train at Belvedere Special School in Johannesburg. An observant teacher encouraged him to show his picture to the class next door – "and that is when I decided I wanted to be an artist", he says.

He attended the prestigious Michaelhouse, where today one of his signature sculptures, Archangel St Michael slaying a dragon, takes pride of place at the school. "Of course, it was a bit of poetic licence, but I wanted to establish myself at my old school," he says.

It was his love of nature, and especially birds, that saw him conquer the academic drawback of dyslexia to master intricate forms and creations in some spectacular works. His attention to detail is exceptional and the ability to capture the essence of his subject involves long hours observing, drawing and sketching from life, as well as studying taxidermic examples borrowed from collections and museums.

His natural inquisitiveness, inventiveness and a sense of fun gives his work a uniqueness not often found in the bronze medium.

Robbie left school and enrolled at Cape Town Technikon (now the Cape Peninsula University of Technology) majoring in sculpture. After two years he could not afford the fees and moved to Pretoria, where he was offered employment at an earth-moving equipment company, where another of his signature pieces, Digman, is displayed.

He completed his degree at Pretoria Technical College. In the early years, he carved birds from pieces of jacaranda wood for a living. It was only later, in the Natal Midlands, that he found a local farmer who provided a shed with electricity where he could establish his own foundry.

Technique

Robbie uses the lost wax technique, in which the sculpture first emerges as a wax mould, and is then displaced by the molten material he uses to cast his creations. Robbie works with different mediums, specialising in bronze, silver and stainless steel. He enjoys tackling difficult and technically demanding compositions. He likes to combine different mediums as well as inlaying semi-precious stones such as tourmalines and garnets into his compositions.

The story of 'The Vicious Circle'

The blade of a circular saw with its deadly teeth was the inspiration for The Vicious Circle. From this he developed the idea of a circle of viciously fighting hyenas and lions. It epitomises the movement and absent space of art, rotating on a pivot to reveal the intense rivalry and fierce encounters of the animals. Each swivel and change of level produces another vicious moment in this battle for survival.

The Vicious Circle expresses his own artistic interpretation of form evaporating in space and blurring movement, similar to his favourite sculptor Umberto Boccioni, whose famous piece Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, he viewed at the Tate Modern Art Museum in London.

Lady Conyngham remembers seeing Robbie's first attempt to create The Vicious Circle, which was in the wax form. "I exclaimed 'Oh, a tondo!'," she said. "A tondo is a format for relief sculpture and painting quintessentially a product of the Renaissance and describes a circular work of art and derives from rotondo, meaning round."

She said many of the great sculptors and painters of Renaissance Florence in the 15th century used this form. "The inspiration for the sculpture was conceived while Robbie was artist in residence at Lion Sands (adjacent to the Kruger Park). He reworked it over time until he was totally satisfied and he has created a complex, evocative and turbulent work with compositional depth, with the voids and solids interacting as models of energy."