Charlene Payton-Holt Govedare & Powell Violet Collen
"Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it"
– Bertolt Brecht
A Spiritual Heritage, The People of the Coulees – by Gloria Geary
David Govedare & Keith Powell
When you approach David Govedare’s home in the emerald-green Chewelah Valley, there’s no doubt you’re entering an artist’s abode. With a welcoming Buddha-like figure made out of core 10 steel sitting at the fork in the road, and two 30" diameter Ponderosa Pine logs at the entrance, it’s a welcome you won’t easily forget.
If you’ve ever participated in Spokane’s ‘Bloomsday Run’, you’ve seen Govedare’s work. Titled "The Runners" it has become a Spokane tradition for race participants to ‘dress’ the 40 steel runners with their t-shirts on race day.
As a sculptor, David experiments with many kinds of materials, influenced as
a child by his father, who was a welder and engineer. His metal art sculptures
surround his
home site like silent sentries with his workshop a stone’s throw away from his
living quarters.
Long-time friend, Keith Powell is a painter and sculptor. One of the highlights in his long career was creating the illustration for musician Waylon Jennings’ CD cover entitled "The Eagle." While both men work separately with many projects to their credit, they try and collaborate at least twice a year.
The two artists met while exhibiting their work at western art shows in Spokane. Their collaboration goes back at least 15 years. As you traverse highway 395 through Chewelah, one of many collaborations comes into view. Titled "The First Fires of Chewelah", it is the large mural on the Century Tel wall, a sacred story of the Chewelah valley depicted at the end of the ice age. The artists spent quite a few months researching the project. Keith clarifies, "as for the mural in Chewelah, David got that job, and he asked me to come in on it, we discussed the format, what we wanted to depict, we photographed, sketched, and thought about a shelter. We thought how it would be constructed, how it would be used, what it would’ve been like to live that long ago."
David adds, "there are plenty of murals that nostalgically remember the time
the white settlers moved in on the placid Indian village, that story has been
told thousands of times all over the country. This land isn’t about the time
when people came and made America happen. We went far enough back to when no one
group was claiming land ownership, we went back to when we were all one".
Powell is something of a local historian, although he is reluctant to label his work ‘historical art’, he is more comfortable with the term ‘spiritual art’. Both artists verify the sources for their work, and strive for historical accuracy when depicting the clothing, guns or other elements of the 18th century when working on a piece.
The first white men known to the Nez Percé tribe were Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. This historical meeting is the basis for their most ambitious project to date, "The Lewis & Clark Expedition Meeting The Nez Percé Tribe". Now permanently installed at the interchange of highway 12 and 95 at the base of the Lewiston grade, the work required a semi-truck to transport over 25 flat-steel sculptures, including: 13 people, 7 horses, 1 mule, 1 dog, a flagpole, elk skull, buffalo skull and a campfire for the city of Lewiston, Idaho. The artists strived to give the figures a human quality, stressing the fact that they were real people, not some heroic-stoic standoffish types. The two men get personally involved in the lives they’re trying to depict, and researched the personal lives of these tribal people. The reaction from the present day tribe has been good. "We treated them as if they were people that were in their homes, who came out to greet some guests", Powell states. It just so happened that their front yard was the entire valley. Stock Steel loaned the artists the 40’ semi-truck. The driver needed chains to navigate the narrow country roads because of a freak snowstorm in March. How do the artists navigate the complex maze of producing public art?
Powell explains, "we can give them a lot for their money than any other system. The type of work we’ve been doing with the flat steel silhouettes gives a lot of drama, a lot of detail, and also creates the illusion of movement. It’s realistic work, and, at the same time, impressionistic. About the Nez Percé project he states, "when you’re driving through them—you have to drive through them, you can’t stop—it’s set up to create the illusion of movement. Because you’re moving, it looks like something’s happening. They’ve gotten quite a number of calls to 911 that there were horses on the freeway."
Like modern-day Nez Percé, Keith gives this analogy about their working style, "some people are like farmers, they till their fields, they go to work, they know where they’re going to get their money. They know what they’re going to get when they harvest their crops. We’re like ‘hunter-gatherers’--we’ve got to go out and find our prey, we’ve got to kill it and eat it. Then we hope we can find some more".
Govedare states about their working relationship, "we think like two friends who are witnessing something in life, who are just talking about it, we build on the enjoyment of what we’re experiencing."
When I visited the workshop, they were running up against a deadline, trying to complete "Mr. Biddle" for Loon Lake. "Mr. Biddle" is a life-size sculpture, welded together in the studio, after being cut from ¾" core 10 steel from a local manufacturer to Govedare’s and Powell’s exact specifications. Mr. Biddle is sitting back, enjoying his day fishing at Loon Lake. His chest is graced with a cutout of his wife’s profile, nearest to his heart.
Another of their works, which they both agreed was the most difficult to produce was "Antoine Plante" who was a trapper/trader of French-Indian heritage (most likely a Flathead Indian). The piece was requested by Spokane County and is located on the Spokane River at Plantes Ferry Park, near Spokane. Antoine Plante pursued fur trapping while also guiding explorers and settlers when he decided to settle on the Spokane River to run a ferry service. The ferry was taken over by the county of Spokane with Plante as the operator; therefore, he was the first employee of Spokane County. Antoine the sculpture is an imposing three-dimensional figure with a cast-iron face standing on the river.
The Soap Lake Garden Club of Soap Lake, Washington is financing an ongoing project, titled "Calling the Healing Waters". The final piece will be a cast bronze one and half times life-size sculpture of two figures that create a sundial. When completed, it will grace the shore of Soap Lake. The sculpture is set to be ‘pointed up’, (scaled up to size) from the maquette. Some of the elements in the sculpture will be detailed in the workshop, while some elements are detailed onsite.
Another one of their site-specific sculptures is two twenty-four foot long feathers that are at the entrance to Coeur d' Alene Idaho on highway 95. That piece is called "The Guardians".
Through their art, Govedare & Powell share stories of this land’s ancestors and urge a dialogue between the past and present while honoring the spiritual heritage of the people of the coulees. Looking at their work, we experience a time and place when everyday people became a part of history and feel the interconnectedness of those who have walked this ground with us and before us. A love of history and the land is evident in their work and will be appreciated by many well into the future. These are stories that truly bring history alive, and help us realize that we all share a part of history, a part of the present, and a part of the future.
