David Provan’s art workshop was nestled in the bottom floor of a modern home, tucked far back on a wooded property in Cold Spring, New York, where he lived with his wife, Ann. The location was in a rural respite with a historic town and active arts scene fifty miles north of Manhattan. His own metal sculptures dotted the yard, and, inside, lined shelf after shelf in a cavernous storage room that took up most of the home’s lower level.
The workshop itself included an orderly peg board lined with tools—chisels, wire cutters, wrenches, rulers, measuring tape. Every surface was covered in more tools, along with a dozen or so half-finished pieces of art—a series of yellow metal squares and circles arranged in an egg-like shape, rusting metal making a clover-like loop-de-loop. Every morning, when he came down to work, he looked for what called to him, then worked on that.
The seventy-five-year-old sculptor, a trim man with a thatch of gray hair and dark-framed glasses, explored, through his work, “the difference between three dimensions and one dimension,” he said, and, perhaps more importantly, “emptiness.” To that end, his works were informed by Asian philosophies—particularly the concepts of maya, or illusion, and yab-yum, the union of opposites.
Provan’s journey toward Buddhism began when he enlisted in the Navy at age seventeen, during the Vietnam War. He chose to enlist, rather than being drafted. “It was either volunteer for the Navy or be drafted into the Army,” he explained. “I would have preferred not to have gone, but I didn’t have a lot of choices at the time.” He flew reconnaissance missions up until the age of twenty-two. He described his service in the war as “pretty posh, in a way. We were always on a base.” When he first arrived in Vietnam, the base was a plywood platform on two-by-fours with a screen tacked around it and a corrugated roof. But as his service progressed, he ended up on a different base with air conditioning, which was quite something at the time.
Concurrently, Provan was diagnosed with malignant melanoma, skin cancer. “My doctor really impressed upon me how deadly this cancer was, and it shook me up. It was terrible at the time, but in retrospect, I think it was something everyone should go through because when you confront your death, particularly when you’re twenty-two—boom, everything comes into focus. It’s like your priorities sort themselves out.”
When his service concluded four years after he’d enlisted, Provan was stationed in Japan. When he visited the personnel office to make plans for his discharge, the officer there asked if he’d like to return home to Mountain View, California. He spontaneously answered that he might like to remain in Japan, or perhaps visit India; this answer surprised even Provan himself. The officer flipped through a three-ring binder and said, “We can send you to New Delhi, India. How would that be?” Provan, slightly stunned, agreed. He later recalled, “I don’t know if I would’ve ever done it, if this wasn’t just put in my lap like that.”
During his time in the Navy, he’d been studying Buddhism and yoga, reading the works of D. T. Suzuki and others. He decided to explore Buddhism in India, making a pilgrimage to Bodh Gaya. He eventually made his way to Kathmandu, trekking up to the Mount Everest base camp in the Himalayas. About halfway up, he stopped at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery. By this time, Provan had become serious about his Buddhist practice. He quickly took a monastic vow there, and received a letter of recommendation from the lama in charge. That lama sent him to a Tibetan rinpoche, who sent him to live at one of his monasteries in Kathmandu.
“The background that I came out of—California, the Navy, America—is focused on this whole pursuit of wealth, material stuff,” he explained. “And I thought, well, this can’t be the way to do it. There’s got to be a better way of living than this. So, I was trying to find an alternative way of being.”
But he couldn’t stay at the monastery for long as an American citizen. He got several three-month visas, and began bouncing back and forth between Nepal and India. Eventually, the rinpoche sent him to a lama who was teaching Tibetan language near Calcutta. Provan studied with the lama for a while, but he never got a knack for the language. However, he also took a class on Indian miniature painting and loved it, reviving an interest that dated back to his youth.
Provan had grown up among the arts; his father was a painter. When he was about three years old, his dad gave him a sheet of paper and some paint and let him do whatever he wanted. Then his father framed his creation and entered it into a professional art show in San Francisco, where they lived. The senior Provan also entered his own work. The child’s was accepted, and the adult’s was rejected. Thus, family lore was set. Provan was destined to become a professional artist.
When he returned to the States in his mid-twenties, he decided to go to college on the G.I. Bill. Though he hadn’t been a good high school student, he’d changed at lot since then, and he excelled at Santa Barbara City College. After two years, he was able to transfer to Yale, where he majored in painting and minored in architecture. After that, he attended the Royal College of Art in London for his master’s degree, then returned to California to start his own studio.
For Provan, Buddhist concepts became a bedrock of his artistic identity, as is apparent in his most recent artist statement: “I’ve come to understand that we inhabit a universe that extends far beyond the grasp of our five senses. These extremes evade us because they are, for the most part, too tiny, too huge, or too glacially slow for us to grasp. Through my studies and ultimately through my art, I’ve tried to construct objects that model and resonate with that world that lies just beyond our understanding.”
In 1985, Provan moved to New York City to seek his fortunes in a major art capital of the world. At first, he lived in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, which was not quite what it is today. He met his future wife, Ann, who was also an artist. She invited him to live with her in her SoHo loft.
He did, and from there, his fortunes rose. He had shows at major galleries, he got a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and he got a $100,000 commission from the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) to do a public sculpture installation at its Herald Square stop.
The MTA commission turned out to be both a highlight and a lowlight of his career: “I thought, oh, I’m on top of the world here. I was written up in all the newspapers, and so, I thought, I’m famous. I’ve never before had more than a hundred thousand dollars. Wow, this is great. But it turned so sour and anxiety-producing that at the end, I kind of thought, wow, is that even worth it at all?”
For the next few years, Provan constructed the sculpture. But as soon as it was installed, right over the F train, he realized it would be impossible to maintain, to keep it clean and lubricated so that the nine-foot paddles could turn. It took seven years for him to finish it to his liking, as he wrestled with collaborating with the agency on such details as lighting. He simply had to give up on the question of maintenance. “It’s a mobile, which they would never do now,” he said with a laugh. “All they do now is mosaics. They learned from me—no more sculpture, and especially no more kinetic sculpture.”
He and Ann got married and had twins together in 1997. After more than twenty years in the city—in SoHo and Brooklyn—they moved upstate. There he was plugged into the vibrant local art scene until he passed away in April 2024. His recent shows were at the Lockwood Gallery in Kingston, New York, and Garrison Art Center in Garrison, New York.
“Provan’s sculptures carve into space, delineating its contours with poetry and precision,” the local Chronogram magazine said of his Garrison exhibit. “His structures define the nebulous space that we inhabit, inhale, and generally take for granted. This continuous void is central to the artist’s work, pointing to the emptiness at the heart of Eastern philosophy.”
Though such Buddhist-inspired concepts remained central to his work, Provan eventually let go of regular practice. (He did, however, have some zafus in his studio, “for convenience sitting,” he said.) “Once in a while, I start feeling frantic, and I go, oh, something is kind of amiss here,” he explained. “And then I’ll sit for a few minutes and that’ll usually clear that up.”
His Buddhist foundations were most present when he was conceiving his art. “Some of the ideas I’m interested in are impermanence and emptiness,” he said, “and all the time I’m trying to improve how I depict that. That pushes me to generate another piece. So, it’s like I’m always correcting my mistakes.”
In his large storage room, sculptures—some of them miniscule, some several feet wide or tall—lined every surface. Three long rows of shelves divided the room, making it feel like a shop selling his eclectic wares. As he surveyed the scores and scores of pieces, the sum of his work over the past several decades, he said, “It feels so deficient. Is that all?”
In Buddhism, the four bodhisattva vows are: “Sentient beings are numberless; I vow to save them. Desires are inexhaustible; I vow to put an end to them. The dharmas are boundless; I vow to master them. The buddha way is unattainable; I vow to attain it.” Any of us who have chanted these vows can relate to Provan’s lifelong quest to always do more.
