David Brown, who has died in Cape Town at the age of 65, was one of South Africa's leading sculptors. His work, which combined raw energy with beautiful craftsmanship and attention to detail, reflected the world he saw from the window of his first studio on the edge of District Six in the '80s, 15 years after it had been reduced to a wasteland by apartheid bulldozers.What he saw was a world full of violence, brutality, cruelty, beauty, pathos and humour.His first solo exhibition, Dogs of War, in 1980 at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, consisted of large, brooding sculptures in metal jackets and armour.He used the dog as a symbol of both powerlessness and aggression.Five years later, another collection of 23 separate but linked bronzes titled Procession was exhibited at the Goodman and later at the Basel Art Fair in Switzerland, representing victims and victors, the condemned and the triumphant, en route to an uncertain destination.After Procession came Voyages (1989), groups of figures on a ship, rowing, pulling, hoisting, bellowing and going nowhere.Among his largest, most ambitious sculptures was Dialogue at the Dogwatch (1995), commissioned by a wealthy South African businessman for his estate on the Thames.It took Brown two years to complete and covers an area of 30m by 11m with a height of 6.5m.When the businessman sold his mansion, Hennerton House at Henley-on-Thames, the sculpture was donated to the University of Cape Town, where it now stands on the Middle Campus.One of his last projects, The Eleven Deadly Sinners (2015), was inspired by a book on Stalin's gulags.He wondered what was going through the minds of the train drivers as they drove their human cargo to the camps in Siberia. One of the deadly sinners is The Train Driver. Others are The Surgeon, The Hunter, The Butcher, The Soldier and The Prison Warden."They are satirical," he explained. "They deal with the absurd, they deal with the paradoxes and the profoundly destructive nature of humankind."He used humour to temper the images "so that they are not totally unrelenting", he said during an interview at his studio in Salt River while he was engaged in the extraordinarily hard physical labour of making them.He used to spend about eight hours a day manhandling gas cylinders, axes, files and angle-grinders as he created his huge sculptures. He loved the physicality of the work, using his whole body as a tool."I love materials that resist," he said. He didn't like working with clay because it was "too mushy".At the time of his death he had been spending six hours a day carving a massive log that came from the Old Pier in Cape Town.Brown was born in Johannesburg on February 3 1951 and moved to Cape Town when he was 15. He matriculated at Westerford High School and studied design and photography at the Michaelis School of Fine Art. He married Pippa Skotnes, now a professor there, whose father, the legendary artist Cecil Skotnes, took one look at his work and told him to be a sculptor.He gave him a bit of wood and some plaster and told him to make shapes out of that. Brown said it felt like an electric charge had gone through his body.Brown found parts of the art world "facile and phoney". He hated the hype and ambition that he felt drove too many artists. He thought of himself as a bit of a lone wolf. Apart from two brief stints as a lecturer, he made a living from his art, but it was not easy. He constantly worried that he might not earn enough to make it through the year.He received commissions from collectors in Germany, Britain, Europe and the US, including a Hollywood film star and a farmer in Brussels for whom he made a sculpture mounted on a World War 2 bunker.His last commission was to make 13 sculptures for someone building a house near Kruger National Park that had to be strong enough to cope with elephants rubbing their backsides on them, he was told.He loved hiking and surfing. It was while surfing at Muizenberg that he drowned after suffering a suspected aneurysm and heart attack.He is survived by his wife, Pippa, and son, Jules.1951-2016..