David Smith Quotes

The material called iron or steel I hold in high respect. What it can do in arriving at a form economically, no other material can do.. .What associations it possesses are those of this century: power, structure, movement, progress, suspension, destruction, brutality. [quote, early 1950's]

[learning European modern art by seeing it in the art-magazine 'w:Cahiers d'art'].. ..my heritage was all those things; [De Stijl, Constructivism, Cubism, Surrealism ] simultaneously, so I am all those things. I hope with a very strong intellectual regard for Cubism, and an admiration for it, because it was great at a particular time. It was both painting and sculpture. It was a great point of liberation in both painting and sculpture, and especially sculpture. [David Smith was one of the few sculptors in the art scene of American Abstract Expressionism ]

An arrogant independence to create is my only motivation.

That is the marvel -- to question but not to understand. Seeing is the true language of perception. Understanding is for words. As far as I am concerned, after I've made the work, I've said everything I can say.

I will not change an error if it feels right, for the error is more human than perfection. I do not seek answers. I haven't named this work nor thought where it would go. I haven't thought what it is for, except that it is made to be seen. I've made it because it comes closer to saying who I am than any other method I can use. This work is my identity.

Visions are from the imaginative mind, sculpture can come from the found discards in nature, from sticks and stones and parts and pieces, assembled or monolithic, solid form, open form, lines of form, or, like a painting, the illusion of form. And sculpture can be painting and painting can be sculpture..

I maintain my identity by regular work, there is always labor when inspiration has fled, but inspiration returns quicker when identity and the work stream are maintained.

I now know that sculpture is made from rough externals by rough characters or men who have passed through all polish and are back to the rough again.
The mystic modeling clay in only Ohio mud, the tools are at hand in garages and factories. Casting can be achieved in almost every town.

[S]culpture as a process of recognition.. .. in the great quiet of stopped machines -- the awe, the pull.. .Part is personal heritage.. .Since I've had identity, the desire to create excels over the desire to visit [the ancient sites and museums in Italy].

Gradually [late 1920's] the canvas became the base and the painting was a sculpture. [quote, early 1950's]

I want sculpture to show the wonder of man, that flowing water, rocks, clouds
vegetation have for the man in peace who glories in existence.. .Its existence will be its statement

Possibly I can explain my own procedure more easily. When I begin a sculpture I'm not always sure how it is going to end. In a way it has a relationship to the work before, it is in continuity with the previous work — it often holds a promise or a gesture toward the one to follow.

I do not often follow its path from a previously conceived drawing. If I have a strong feeling about its start, I do not need to know its end; the battle for solution is the most important. If the end of the work seems too complete and final, posing no question, I am apt to work back from the end, that in its finality it poses a question and not a solution.
Sometimes when I start a sculpture I begin with only a realized part; the rest is travel to be unfolded, much in the order of a dream.

I don't make boy sculptures. They become kind of personages, and sometimes they cry out to me that I should have been better or bigger, and mostly they tell me that I should have done that twelve years before -- or twenty years before

Sculpture is as free as the mind; as complex as life..