Sculpture

Photographs make it clear that David Chudy produced sculpture in Northern Rhodesia, during the period 1938-47. However none of these works have survived.

A reasonable guess is that he was not able to preserve that work adequately. Had he chosen wood or stone they surely would have stood the test of time but we see that he chose modeling in clay, which necessitates time and technology to fix for posterity.

His move to Southern Rhodesia in 1947 and the creation of a terrazzo and general building construction company, with his wife Ellen, emboldened him in dealing with physical objects.

He now routinely worked with large marble and terrazzo forms, on an industrial level but still he his passion was clay. Whatever the medium, an artist without a studio will be limited to producing a certain kind of work.

With a large factory premises, many physical barriers began to fall away. With the help of Romo Fiorini he had mastered lost wax bronze casting with local materials. He he had built his own impromptu foundry at his factory site. He felt free to work in clay knowing it was possible to make such work permanent. Even so it was still a time consuming and arduous process. His life was cut short and relatively few of his gross output of sculptures were cast in bronze.

Large clay positives can only be kept for so long before the material starts to dry and crack. A negative, plaster mold must be created for archival purposes. David Chudy stored many of his completed sculptures merely as first generation negative molds.

A sculpture cannot readily be determined ‘in the negative’. Hence no one, even the artist, could enjoy their presence in that form. ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ – it seems strange that he was prepared to move on without being able to materially review his past work.

After his death numerous positive plaster copies were cast and we now enjoy a privileged overview of his back catalog, that the artist never experienced himself.

David Chudy’s work hits a groove stylistically in many senses in the then ‘Southern Rhodesia’ ,and style is subordinate to ‘subject matter and execution’ till the 60’s. These were his last years, after returning from the Far East. That final period involved more abstraction – a return to symbolism both in painting as well as in sculpture.

As a painter, David Chudy always worked with oils, but he retired his brushes in preference to palette knife in the move to Southern Rhodesia. He never went back. The tactile quality of the pallete knife brought a touch of micro-abstraction to his work even as there was overall form. The unpredictability in applying color sometimes brought him close to expressionism. The texture of clay had always been tactile.The basic materials and processes now remain constant for almost two decades, untill his death. That meant: ‘oil on canvas applied with a palette knife’ and clay portraiture intended to be cast in bronze.

There were a few exceptions: ‘David in the Pit’, a massively heavy, solid, chiseled sandstone sculpture is an outlier in terms of mass and scale, as well as material and process. Impressive though that work is – and approaching the scale of some of his public art – portraits now ruled in David Chudy’s art. They were life size and sculpted in clay from now on.