Bob Provost
My art has morphed into geometric abstraction, and relief sculpture, almost all of it realized with the same color palette. My vast experience in architecture strongly informs my work, wherein I was a draughtsman for 25+ years. I began to pursue expressing my forms of visual art in order to chase a feeling of satisfaction I hardly experienced while assisting architects, engineers & designers with realizing their own visions.
My work is enhanced by my obsessive-compulsive nature, fixation on basic arithmetic, proportion, and the number 3. I'm not interested to understand why inasmuch as what 3 may symbolize: the trinity, trilogy, triad, triangle, and the pronouns: mine, yours, theirs, etc. Being a little superstitious about the use of even numbers feeds my use of 3, and other odd numbers.
I believe beauty can be perceived in places wherein we don’t often let our minds spend time: architectural drawings, especially those that have been realized by hand the old-school way. Like fine art they have a presence where it's not necessarily easy to pinpoint the nuances they possess which make them interesting to stare at to begin with.
It's my hope that my draftsmanship & blue-collar ethic elucidates my artwork, and vice-versa; that it ignites a person's curiosity to see more of my work. And, to appreciate the methodology I use to tie together the beauty of form, color, and dimension Z that are always readily available to everyone.
I believe my currently-themed works reflect the marriage of my work ethic & experience in architecture in that there is a strong use of precisely drafted, and laboriously cut & milled wood that might be overlooked under normal circumstances. However, with the use of stark color, mode of attachment, and a representational title, this said work, in the form of a relief sculpture, is very obviously accentuated.
– Bob Provost
12.01.2020