David Provan

Earlier this year, we were deeply saddened by the loss of a friend and fellow artist, David Provan. His absence is still a shock, and a reminder ­– as if we needed one – that life is fleeting and unpredictable. Those who knew David appreciated his warmth, humor, and intellect; those familiar with his artwork know him as a brilliant, consummate artist. David was a sculptor who worked in steel, wood, and clay; he was a potter whose vessels are elegant and understated; he was a painter and draftsman, a furniture designer, and, most recently, he was exploring mosaic as a medium for his two-dimensional designs. Everything he made possessed a quality that all artists strive for and therefore rarely achieve, that singular fusion of skill, depth, and effortlessness. David’s work was deeply influenced by his extended travels in Japan, India, and Nepal, where he lived in a monastery in Kathmandu and became an ordained Buddhist monk. His immersion in Eastern philosophy is manifest in all his work, where his innate Western classicism merges with an open-ended Asian aesthetic. It makes for an intriguing dialogue within the work, where the artist implicitly poses the questions, but instead of responding in the classical tradition, David leaves it unresolved and open to interpretation. Indeed, his work seems to eschew a facile reading, leaning into an Eastern tradition that favors subjectivity and mind-bending koans. Many of his sculptures are perforated through to the other side, as though he wants us to see beyond the solidity of Western thought and puncture the illusion of permanence. Imagine the Greek sculptor Praxiteles completing his masterpiece, Hermes and Dionysus, then drilling holes in the marble so you could see clear through. David seems to suggest that the Western paradigm is but one of many options, and the least aligned with science and contemporary thought. A year ago, his solo show, Barely Not Impossible, was on display at Garrison Art Center in the Hudson Valley. (Read my review in Chronogram here). For his artist talk at the gallery, David asked me to lead him in a conversation about his practice and ideas. In preparation, we had a conversation on Zoom where I asked the questions, he responded, and we jumped into some interesting rabbit holes. The following is our conversation, edited for brevity, but true to the spirit of our exchange. It was an honor to take a deep dive into his work, and to have known David Provan as an artist, seeker, and friend.

MH: When you were in your 20s, you spent some years traveling in Japan, India, and Nepal. How did Asian art impact you while you were there, and how did it influence your direction as an artist?
DP: I was aware of the art as I was traveling around the East, and I visited the museums, the caves in India, and all that. But it wasn’t the art that interested me as much the philosophy of Buddhism, yoga, and the duality of the universe. They were more influential than the art itself. Then after I came back to the States, I became interested in studying Asian art.
MH: What were you drawn to in Eastern philosophy?
DP: It was how the Asian culture was so different than the way I’d been raised in America. I saw how I’d been conditioned by my upbringing, and that there were other options available to me. It made me realize that there was room to reinvent myself, and that was more valuable to me at the time than looking at thangkas and mandalas.
MH: Did you have an art background?
DP: Yes, I was born into an art family. My dad was an artist, so museums, galleries, and studio visits were natural to me, but I didn’t think about being an artist myself until much later.
MH: So after traveling in Asia and studying under various spiritual teachers, you returned to the States and decided to go to art school?
DP: Yes, when I got back to California, I went to Santa Barbara City College. I found that I had some facility, but I hadn’t found my voice yet, so I basically followed what everyone else was doing at the time.  From there I went to Yale and got my B.A. in Art and Architecture, and it was there that the ideas around the duality of existence started to percolate into my work. Then I went to the Royal College of Art in London and got an M.A. in Painting, and I began to explore these ideas in two dimensions.
MH: How does the Asian aesthetic differ for you from Western art? Does it have an emotional appeal or is it primarily a cerebral connection?
DP: When I look at Asian art, I’m thinking more of the philosophical implications than what it looks like. And that filters down into my work, which is diagrammatic and about symbolic structure rather than emotional appeal. I’ve collected a lot of Asian art and am most attracted to the Tantric diagrammatic paintings rather than thangkas or figurative pieces.
MH: It seems that from the beginning of your creative path, you’ve been interested in the concept of emptiness. What attracted you to this exploration, which is essentially an investigation of nothing?
DP: Well, first I’d say that it’s not an investigation of nothing, it’s more about the interrelationship between nothing and something. Emptiness is the main theme of my work, but not the only theme. The key to all my work is the Chinese concept of yin yang, the tai chi symbol. This concept has been the continuous thread throughout my work, as I’ve tried to find more refined ways of demonstrating it, instead of the familiar white dot and black dot. I’ve explored how it applies to other things, like birth, death, and the cycle of life, as well as figure and ground, presence and absence. All these elements come into my work to some degree in my studio practice. It’s often very subtle, but it’s there.
MH: Why are you so drawn to the concept of yin yang? What meaning does it have for you?
DP: When I came to feel like I really understood it, I was living in a monastery in Nepal, and there was a purification practice that we had to do to show that we were serious about our practice. We had to do 100,000 prostrations, and then when we finished that, the next practice was a meditation on the male/female principle in sexual union. As I performed these meditations, I gradually started seeing everything in pairs, everything working in opposition to something else. Political parties, nation states, I began to see how everything balances each other out. This is the essence of yin yang.
MH: Have you found that emptiness has meaningful variations? Or is emptiness just emptiness, end of story?
DP: I see emptiness as an absolute, the base foundation of everything. And then permeating it are these flickerings of atomic particles that come together and gel into something, and you get a star or a planet or infinite variations. But I think of the void as the base condition.
MH: As you’re working are you thinking of it as a void or as emptiness?
DP: I consider them the same thing. There’s a great underlying futility in my studio work because it’s very hard to illustrate the void using steel as a medium. It’s sort of antithetical, but I’m working symbolically, trying to indicate a volume out of steel that’s perforated. You can see inside and through it, so it has a lacy, open, not-quite-there presence. In a way it’s a failure, especially when I’m using 200 pounds of steel to illustrate nothing. I’m talking about emptiness but I’m filling it up with all this hardware! (haha) Not only do I miss the bull’s eye, but I miss the target altogether.
MH: Well, you’ve got to do something, right? It’s an interesting paradox to try to portray emptiness, because if you do nothing at all, not even make random marks or use impermanent materials, then you’re left with performance art.
DP: Yes, then there’s nothing there and there’s nothing to respond to. I want to at least put something out there that you can contemplate.
MH: It’s hard to talk about emptiness without bringing up Buddhism. Do Buddhist principles play a role in your work, or do you prefer to steer clear of spiritual connotations?
DP: I don’t quote Buddhist concepts directly in my work, but the influence is there. The Diamond Sutra explains the void not so much as volumetric emptiness, but in the fact that nothing is permanent.  Everything is in a state of transition, and there are no autonomous objects; there is growth, peak, disintegration, and regeneration ­– an ongoing procession.
MH: Is a void easier to express than infinite emptiness?
DP: I’m trying to emulate the idea of a void, but of course it’s not true emptiness. Even when I make it open-shaped, it’s still full of air, which violates the voidness since air is just another material. I want to jolt myself and other people to think about this, and to viscerally have the experience of emptiness. But I can’t weld together a bunch of steel and create a void, I can only make a symbol of it. So I create this steel contraption that’s hollow inside, and I see it as a symbol of the way that all material things are. Because everything is made of atoms, which are emptiness with just a little spark of subatomic particles flying around.
MH: So your sculptures are in fact about the empty space.
DP: Right, the metal is just there to define the emptiness.
MH: At the heart of Asian aesthetics there’s the concept of impermanence. Does this idea influence your work, and if so, how does it show up?
DP: Definitely. Everything is in a state of transition; a steel sculpture is rusting or deteriorating in some way, even if minutely. Everything is falling apart all the time, which you already know if you own a house. (haha) There’s nothing that you can pin down and say it’s permanent.
MH: This points to an underlying paradox in your work, because you’re using an extremely durable material to talk about impermanence.
DP: That’s what I love about it. It’s so illogical.
MH: I think of someone like Serra, whose sculptures are monumental, but like anything, they’re subject to the laws of entropy. At some point they’ll disintegrate, but we’re talking about millennia. Technically it’s impermanent, but it’s geological time.
DP: It’s still on the spectrum, but it’s one of the slower examples of it. Even glaciers are on the spectrum.
MH: Your 2D works are densely layered with patterns, creating visual effects that tease the eye. They often leave very little breathing room, and the eye has no resting place; no emptiness, as it were. How do you see this space? Is it the flip side of emptiness? Emptiness filled to the brim? 
DP: I hadn’t thought of that, but yes, there’s no horizon line, no way to get out of it. But again, I see it more as a diagram or map than a picture of something. I look at it in two ways: the figure/ground relationship is a concern of most artists, because traditionally you do a portrait of someone, and there’s a background behind them. Mona Lisa poses in front of an Italian landscape, but she’s also a product of that landscape. Likewise, my 2D work is an artistic device, but it’s also a metaphor for the individual as the product of his or her background.
MH: That’s interesting. So we’re all basically figure/ground relationships with arms and legs.
DP: Right. My DNA, language, nationality, race, gender, socioeconomic class, education ­– all these various threads weave together to make David Provan here in 2023. I am a product of my background, as was Mona Lisa, as are all of us.
MH: There’s a contrast between your 2D and 3D work, both in concept and spatial expression. There are similarities in the shapes, but the space is quite different.
DP: Yes, the figure/ground relationship can only be expressed in 2D, because in 3D, the ground becomes the surrounding world. So the 2D work tends to be more diagrammatic, while the sculpture expresses more about space and emptiness. It’s interesting because my degree is in painting, but over the years I realized I had to move into three dimensions to express the void, then around 2017 I realized that I needed to go back to painting to express the figure/ground relationship. So I have two studios and I go back and forth between them. When I have a bunch of ideas for paintings I go in one studio, and when I’m thinking in 3D, I go in the other. There’s not really a hierarchy.
MH: You use the Tibetan symbol of the endless knot in both your 2D and 3D work. What does this symbol refer to? And do you ever think about cultural appropriation when it comes to using esoteric symbols?
DP: It’s open to interpretation, but I see the continuous loop as a symbol of the continuity of life. It alludes to the way life keeps rolling on, despite asteroids, dinosaurs, climate change, and so on. I’ve done a lot of endless knots as drawings, paintings, and sculptures, and as a symbol it ties together some of the ideas that I think about. I have some misgivings about cultural appropriation, but I feel like I’ve paid my dues. I’ve done my 100,000 prostrations! (haha)
MH: Right, there’s always that pesky issue of using another culture’s symbol. The problem is that our American culture doesn’t have that many interesting symbols, unless you’re into painting eagles.
DP: That’s true! My ultimate opinion on cultural appropriation is that culture belongs to everybody. I don’t believe in these nationalistic or religious boundaries; it’s all my heritage, whether it’s a crucifix or a yin yang symbol. It’s open source.
MH: I’m curious if you’ve ever finished a piece and thought, by George, I’ve done it! This piece perfectly expresses everything that I’ve set out to do as an artist, and I’m now complete.
DP: Yes, every time! I think it for about 30 seconds, that this is my ultimate expression, I’ve done it, I’ve said it. And then I think no, this could’ve been done differently, I could do that better, and that projects me into the next piece.
MH: Haha! So true. We’re so delusional when it comes to seeing our art as great.
DP: I think to be an artist you have to be delusional to some degree. Or even to be an operational human being, a little bit of delusion can help you a lot.
MH: So is that 30 seconds of fully embracing your finished piece a helpful part of the process?
DP: Yes, it’s dependent on that, in fact. As I’m working toward concluding a piece, I have to think that this is going to be the holy grail, this is going to answer everything. You have to have that kind of confidence, and then you finish it and it’s either really great or pretty good, but there’s always the feeling that you can do better. So that spurs me on to do the next piece.
MH: What’s the best part about being an artist?
DP: It provides you with a reason to live and something to do that is independent of everyone else. Of course, you integrate with the outer world to be part of the conversation, but you can be a very good artist without the need for outside validation. And I love thinking about time and existence and how it flows and repeats itself, and then translating it into my work. I’m always trying to perfect my language, to make it more succinct, more articulate, more efficient, so there’s always room for improvement. I hit high points with a piece when I’m completing it, but then I always see that there are even higher points, like climbing a mountain. You reach the top of a ridge, only to discover that there’s a higher point on the mountain.
MH: I guess that could be depressing, because you could feel like there’s no end to it, that you’ll never find perfection. So you have to have a certain temperament where you’re okay with never reaching the summit.
DP: Yes, exactly. In Islamic art there’s a rule that you can’t even aspire to perfection because that’s the exalted realm of God. But that’s the beauty of it too, that you can aspire to it, knowing that there’s so much room between here and perfection.

www.davidprovan.com

IMAGE LIST
  1. Radial Displacement, 2021, waxed steel, 18.5 x 23 x 7 in.
  2. Breath, 2023, enamel, corten steel, 33 x 20 x 8 in.
  3. We Live Within Each Other’s Wounds, 2020, corten steel, 39 x 25 x 9 in.
  4. Ohhvoid, 2022, corten steel, 49 x 76 x 22 in.
  5. Fundamental Structure, 2023, enamel, steel, 26 x 21 x 23 in.
  6. Space Splice, 2022, waxed steel, 22 x 15 x 10 in.
  7. Monitor, 2003, steel, 17 x 16 x 5.5 in.
  8. The Great Ongoingness, 2023, waxed steel, 23 x 25 x 7 in.
  9. Route Cause, 2022, corten steel, 24 x 12 x 15 in.
10. Grooved Cylinder, 2004, welded bronze, 8 x 8 x 8 in.
11. No Brainer, 2021, corten steel, 26 x 12 x 10 in.
12. Time Grinder, 1991, enamel, steel, 42 x 35 x 21 in.
13. Pocket Cosmos, 2020, enamel, steel, 23.5 x 18 x 12 in.
14. Dark Rainbow, 2022, enamel, aluminum, 18 x 17 x 4 in.
15. Golem, 2008, stoneware, 11.5 x 9.5 x 5.5 in.
16. House of the Sleeping Woman, 2020, porcelain, 17 x 16 x 4 in.
17. Pompeii Plumbing (PorSer 16), 2013, stoneware, 15 x 18 x 6 in.
18. Totally Else, 2017, stoneware, 15 x 10.5 x 5.5 in.
19. Devpath #102, 2011, carved poplar, 11 x 8 x 6 in.
20. Something From Nothing, 1990, steel, wood, 106 x 74 x 74 in.
21. As If Forever, 2018, India ink, 22 x 15 in.
22. Diamondback Checkerboard, 2019, India ink, colored pencil, 22 x 15 in.
23. Bliss Wish, 2019, India ink, 22 x 15 in.
24. Hypno Ecstasy, 2020, India ink, watercolor, 22 x 15 in.
25. Personal Infinity, 2018, India ink, watercolor, 22 x 15 in.
26. Diagram of the Before and After, 2020, India ink, 23 x 15 in.
27. Promising Conditions, 2020, watercolor on paper, 23 x 15 in.
28. Cyclogasm, 2023, glass mosaic, 20 x 30 in.
29. Ego Agency, 2023, glass mosaic, 20 x 15 in.
30. David Provan, 1948 – 2024
31. The artist in his studio.
32. The artist on his table..