THE BRONZE AGE OF FLY FISHING

FROM COUNTRY LIFE MAGAZINE OCTOBER 2010

In a Kalk Bay studio a talented artist is merging the worlds of fly fishing and art, with spectacular success

*

Chris' Kalk Bay studio

When I first met Chris Bladen a decade ago it would be fair to describe him as a crazy keen fly fisher and a struggling artist. He had a small studio off Windsor Road in Kalk Bay that he and his brother Nick, also a sculptor, shared with a panel beating shop. We became friends and have since covered a fair amount of country together with fly rods.

Chris with a Yellow-margin Trigger fish

In those first few years I watched Chris progress as an artist and a fly fisher. He began sculpting a wider range of fish, including life-size bronzes, gradually became better known, started to make some money and gradually gained fame. But it was a long, hard road to get to the point where you could say he’s now well known, highly respected and is at last making a little money. Not enough to put in a indoor heated swimming pool, but enough to swap his clapped out VW sedan for a smart second hand truck to cart his heavy bronzes and enough to put down a deposit on a modest home in Simon’s Town and to finally ask his long-time sweetheart, Rena, to marry him. That joyful ceremony was held on the banks of a well known trout stream just outside Rawsonville in the Western Cape.

Permit

Of course there’s a delightful synergy between fly fishing and art and the sport has always numbered artists among it’s devotees, including a few really famous ones, like the late Winslow Homer (you’d need to take out a second mortgage on your home to afford one of his works today), Eldridge Hardie, Rod Crossman and AD Maddox – all Americans – and locally, artists like Craig Bertram Smith, Paddy Starling and, of course, Chris Bladen. Fish and fishing lend themselves to art, but few artists really capture the natural, fluid movement and the life in them. This is where Chris excels. His works are alive and I got the feeling looking at one of his most recent works, a jumping tigerfish, that it was about to leap clean through the ceiling. Of late he has been doing life-size bronzes of monster saltwater fish like tarpon, sail fish and kingfish, the heaviest weighing upwards of 100 kilograms. He’s also perfected the intricate alchemy needed to bring rich patinas of colour to his bronzes, from beautiful shades of blues and purples, gold and even shades of emerald green.

Sailfish

Chris began life as a schoolboy at Affies in Pretoria, qualified later as a dental technician and spent a few years in London where he realised that all he really wanted to do was catch fish and make sculptures of them. So he returned to South Africa and set up shop with his brother, Nic, in Kalk Bay. It was around the time when we began fishing together on Cape streams, later moving inland to fish in the Barkly East district. Always Chris had a camera with him to capture nuances of colour, anatomy and proportion in fish and he kept careful notes.

We had a few eventful fishing trips over the years, not the least one where he was travelling in convoy with us in his beat up VW, planning on spending a few days fishing the lakes near Dordrecht with us before leaving for Johannesburg to exhibit his art. His car was laden to the back windows with fly tackle and a dozen big bronzes and every time he hit a dip sparks flew off the exhaust like a Formula 1 racing car. That trip was a huge success. We caught a sack full of big fish and Chris later sold enough bronzes to cover his costs and to get a lot better known. These days he works on commission and many of his bronzes now grace the lounges of ocean going fishing yachts sailing the waters of Florida, Cuba and the Seychelles and he has work on exhibition in major galleries around the world. He can now list America, Wales, Scotland, Cuba, Mexico, the Seychelles, Angola, Uganda and Kenya among the countries he’s fished, along with South Africa of course, and he’s sold bronzes in many of them.

Rising trout

The whole art of sculpting in bronze is complicated and time consuming, beginning first with a carefully made clay model from which a silicone rubber mould is made, followed by a wax copy. Then a ceramic mould is formed around the wax and baked until the wax melts out. The bronze is then melted in a furnace and poured into the ceramic mould that’s heated until its red hot. Once cooled, the ceramic is carefully broken away and the chemistry of adding the patina of colours to the finished bronze then begins. I did say it was complicated.

Chris is still in his Windsor Road premises, but has since rented a spacious studio in Kalk Bay with a long veranda and vistas across the harbour to the shimmering pastel blue shoulders of distant coast lines. He has also put in a small foundry and now has two assistants, his brother in law, Jean Tiran, and Malawian, Gilbert Banda.

I dropped by to see Chris the other day to take pictures of his new studio and his art. None of the success has gone to his head. He’s the same quiet, gentle fly fisher with a ready smile who still needs little excuse to sneak off fly fishing. I’m shown around his new studio and take a few pictures. As I’m about to leave there’s a knock on the door. It’s Chris’s neighbour, well known potter Katherine Glenday, asking if we want to share a pot of coffee. I get the feeling the Kalk Bay community is something of a family.

We sit in the winter sun in Katherine’s studio garden. Chris and I remind ourselves of a particular trip we did to the Barkly district when we ran into one bad injury, several bad roads and a heavy fall of snow. Jacques Rudolph, then a Protea cricketer, was along and on the second day he tore his leg on a barbed wire fence. We were on a remote farm miles from anywhere. Chris remembers me stitching Jacques’ leg on the kitchen table under gas light without anaesthetic, wondering as he took a few pictures, if this would turn out to be a milestone in modern medicine, a libel suit of note or the malpractice case of the year. Later that trip we ran into heavy rain and the roads turned to skating rinks. One night we stuck the truck in a deep ditch just before it started snowing. The next day was blanketed white and dead quiet. I remind Chris how cold it was and how difficult the trout were. He reminds me how clear the light was and how a rainbow arched across the sky. Typically, he’d focused on the creative side of things. But then that’s what you’d expect from a great artist I guess.

Blanketed in snow and a rainbow arched across the sky...

Tom Sutcliffe

FACT FILE

Chris Bladen Sculpture – Kalk Bay Sculpture Studio, 11 Windsor Road Kalk Bay, 7975. Visitors are welcome. Contact Chris on 021 (0) 788 8736 or visit www.chrisbladen.com or email him at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.