David Smith Quotes

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 would like to make sculpture that would rise from water and tower in the air
- that carried conviction and vision that had not existed before..

It will say that in peace we have time that a man has vision, has been fed, has worked..
..That hands and minds and tools and material made a symbol to the elevation of vision

Art has its tradition, but it is a visual heritage. The artist's language is the memory from sight. Art is made from dreams, and visions, and things not known, and least of all from things that can be said. It comes from the inside of who you are when you face yourself. It is an inner declaration of purpose, it is a factor which determines artist identity.

I knew metal working before I knew Calder [famous for his sculptures, made in sheet metal], and Calder is one of our great men and he is earlier by a few years than any of the rest of us [in American Abstract Expressionism ]. Calder had worked in Paris quite a bit in the early days, though he did go to school here in New York at the Art Student's League.. .After my first year in college I had worked on the assembly line in the Studebaker plants up in Indiana..

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

[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].

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

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.

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]

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

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.

[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 ]

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 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