One day, when David Govedare was growing up in Santa Ynez, Calif., his parents planted the 8-year-old boy on a wild mustang they had just bought him and it took off, running away with the lad as he hung on for dear life.

“I just held onto the saddle horn – eventually he got tired of running,” Govedare said. His father also built a go-kart, set him in the seat, “put me in gear and off I went,” he remembered.

“My parents always involved me in the country,” Govedare said of a boyhood filled with backpacking, surfing and ties to nature. But one of the most life-changing things his dad taught him was how to gas and arc weld at the tender age of 10.

“As my dad taught me to weld, my mom was
responsible for helping me learn how to be a creative dreamer,” Govedare said.

That mix of typical and not-so-typical childhood pursuits has stuck with Govedare, who turned 50 last fall and now has his own, home-schooled 8-year-old son helping him out in the shop during study breaks. Govedare grew up to be an architectural designer, but 27 years ago moved on to spend all his time on the love he continues today: sculpting pieces of public art from materials as wide-ranging as cor-ten and stainless steel, copper and aluminum, as well as bronze and silver.

When Govedare entered the competition begun by Bend’s Art in Public Places for a special artwork to grace a roundabout on Mount Washington Drive in the new NorthWest Crossing (http://www.northwestcrossing.com) mixed-use development, the reviewers of more than 30 proposals found a lot to like in Govedare’s idea: a 26 ½-foot-tall “sunrise spirit column,” made of basalt, granite, cooper and steel – and a row of oversized eagle-styled “feathers” hanging from the red, green and brushed stainless steel “sunrise medallion” at the top.

“We put good energy objects in our world to help raise hopes and spirit in each other,” Govedare wrote. “Life is a blessing, and giving thanks is a tradition of our very existence. May the great mystery bring sunrise to our hearts!”

“He really is going to be interesting to be around,” said Jody Ward, who has been part of Art in Public Places, funded by the Bend Foundation, since its inception about 35 years ago. “He’s done some incredible things. He talks like a Native American – his soul is.”

Mayor softly sings as city accepts sculpture as gift to its people

Many impressive, attractive pieces of art have emerged from Govedare’s Great Wheel Studio, on Upper Cottonwood Creek in Chewelah, Wash., a town of 5,000 – with its own ski resort, incidentally – an hour’s drive north of Spokane. From horses on the run in Grant County, to the fleet of static human runners at a Spokane park, his work has been the kind of public art that usually brings attention of a far less divided sort than one recent Art in Public Places project: the “Bend/Gate” that towers beside the Bend Parkway.

Two weeks ago, the Bend City Council agreed without discussion (but with Mayor Bill Friedman softly singing the motion, due to a typo on the word `sign’) to have the city join in an agreement that makes the $30,000 sculpture “a gift to the people of Bend,” in return for the city agreeing to the minimal maintenance costs.

Govedare said Monday from his home studio that the Sunrise Spirit Column represents a “technical shift” in the materials to be used from his “kinship with metal” to something “more of a mixed media.”

“That’s my feeling about the project – it’s that simple,” Govedare said. “It’s an opportunity for me as an artist to share with other people things that have beauty – they have proportion, they have elements of awe to them: `Well, how does that stay there? How is that able to be?’”

While this will be Govedare’s first major work in Oregon, he has dozens of sculptures elsewhere along the West Coast, including a piece created for the Expo 86 Worlds Fair in Vancouver, B.C. and one last year, “Spirit of the Longhorn,” that was his second sculpture destined for Texas City, Texas.

But the Bend location is a natural one for Govedare, both for the land’s shared past and his own. “Bend and Eastern Washington share the same geologic formation, which is why the piece is really quite at home there,” he said. “Geologically, we’re in the same backyard.”

Pieces of `spirit column’ already coming together

“I feel Bend, Oregon is part of my playground and always has been,” he said. “We go to Mount Bachelor and ski. We’ve enjoyed that countryside ever since I was a kid. Our family came up to Crater Lake, Crescent Lake.”

Govedare, who plans to visit Bend next month, spent the past weekend searching for the river-washed granite stones he will use to make up the two blue circles perched on the already-chosen basalt columns, below the “sunrise medallion” that has spiritual significance to Govedare.

“Part of mediation is that you clear out of your mind and create a sort of alpha state in your mind,” he said. “A lot of times, the way one might visually interpret that is when you see a circle shape or mandala. It helps to draw you into the center.”

The sunrise image is key, he said: “To me, each day of your life is a representation of your whole life – it’s a new day, a fresh beginning. You are going to wake up and do something that day, and what are you going to do with it? It’s a nice, fresh day.”

“The color of the ponderosas, the basaltic rock, the red earth, all of the things, the colors … everything will be like a real good interior decorator came into your room,” he said. “This will be the same thing, it’s just on the outside.”

Jody Ward of Art in Public Places said some practical things came into play in making the choice for a sculpture in the 30-foot-wide roundabout: “It can’t be anything that’s so distracting to the driver or makes you want to get out and touch it.”

Artist solicits your help by e-mail in suggesting pictographs for column

Govedare hopes that NorthWest Crossing residents will be able to approach the site on foot. “It is in the roundabout, not a distraction off to the side,” he said. “In some respects, it might be a giant spiritual stop sign. Maybe they should be able to walk out and touch it, but that depends on whether it (the traffic circle) is designed so that it’s safe to do.”

While hands are the key, computers play a role in creating one element of the piece – pictographs to be blasted into the basalt columns – and Govedare is asking for your help as well, using your own PC and the Internet.

Govedare explained that the chosen designs will be downloaded onto a computer disk, and a machine will cut out the mastic to be used for laying the sandblasting path.

“We’re going to sandblast pictographs into the columns all the way around,” he said. “They are not going to be all ancient pictographs. I’m doing pictographs of our lives now. The reasons behind doing them are the same as 50,000 years ago. We’re just doing them now, to picture our lives.”

And he’d like your suggestions, at govedare@theofficenet.com .

“E-mail me with things that are emblematic” of the region, he asked – natural places, such as Pilot Butte (he thought it was called “Pilot Rock”) or Mount Bachelor, a mountain view such as the Three Sisters, or perhaps a bicycle rider, a skier, a snowboarder – what have you.

“It would be interesting to interpret those things,” Govedare said. “The pictographs will be that journey, interpret the spirit of our lives as we live now … traditional symbols of Bend through geology, history, activities – land features, spots on the river. Some of those may be beautifully interpreted through a pictograph.”

The sculptor plans during next month’s visit to bring a foundation plate to the local concrete firm that is going to pour the base for his artwork. Then, once everything is ready later this year, a semi truck will carry the materials south and a crane will lower each of the pieces onto a steel rod that will form the “spine” of the sculpture.

Then they will be all tightened up and welded together – or hung, in the case of the large feathers that Govedare says symbolizes “flight, a spiritual journey, lightness and beauty” – and the “Sunrise Spirit Column” will take up residence in its special new home.

“It should be a pretty magical moment,” Govedare said.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2001 at 12:45 pm and is filed under Top Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.