User:Toby Govan

Toby was born in April 1967 in Edinburgh (Scotland) from which, even though it’s a beautiful city, his parents decided migrate to the “light” of Andalusia (Spain). From the age of six he integrated totally into Spanish society.

He studied at the School of Arts of Granada. He also studied Photography in Madrid, working as a photographer for a time.

But his true master was his father, the late Douglas Govan, a well-known sculptor, who showed him his technique and the magic of “reading the stone”. His mother, Ann Govan, spectacular water-colour painter, taught him to see the world as a “composition”.

Over a period of six years he was sponsored by Sam Benady (Sammer Gallery, Puerto Banus, Spain) and Sandra Billington (S.B. Interiors, Marbella, Spain). This allowed him to flourish as an artist.

There are sculptures of Toby Govan in Spain, Germany, France, United Kingdom, United States and many other countries around the world. His latest masterpiece, “In Your Arms”, weighs three and half tons and took him eight months to create.

Commentary by M. Iglesias

Sculptures that take on the form of congeniality, of origins and of silence. There are sculptors who manage to increase in sublimeness the whole process necessary for creating forms, for expressing poetry and realities through the medium of shape. Toby Govan would thus belong to that group of artists who are able to silence the process, that is, to make the method of allowing forms to arise into something completely silent. We are thus trying to define the style of a sculptor who employs a subtle artistic language, who makes use of a material that adopts a constant and clean embrace, an embrace that comes not only from the absence of ruptures or edges, but also, and especially, thanks to the permanent rounded dimension that most of his works transmit, probably symbolizing a warm nucleus, but also from a special origin and magic point of departure that has a lot to do with Nature.