DON BRAVO SCULPTURE
The Honey Covered Bridge is very thankful that Don Bravo offered to create this one of a kind piece forged from the original bridge iron.
SILENT AUCTION ITEM
Starting Bid: $500
About Don Bravo
Don Bravo insists that he’s not an artist. He just “makes stuff.” Regardless of his claim, when you look around his neatly landscaped backyard and see the examples of the “stuff” he’s made—most strikingly the bells fashioned from old oxygen tanks or fire extinguishers and hung from gorgeous rustic archways made out of scrap metal and weathered wood—it’s obvious Bravo is indeed an artist.
But the retired metal worker and contractor is not being falsely modest when he talks about what he makes. His art is just a continuation of the work he and his father did constructing prototypes at Stanford University. Now, instead of creating something out of the ideas generated by engineering professors, he’s creating sculptures from his own inspiration, which he gets from recycled materials. Sometimes it’s straightforward: 3-foot-long sections of rebar are capped with metal architectural salvage—stars, swirls and hand-formed birds—to make garden stakes. Other times it’s a piece that requires more engineering: fashioning the rusted steel beams of a washed out bridge and a fallen sycamore branch that he found in the creek into the frame of “The Bridge,” his largest bell.