David Smith - Sculpture Quotes

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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..

David Smith
[learning European modern art by seeing it in the art-magazine '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
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.

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

David Smith
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..

David Smith
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

David Smith
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

David Smith
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.

David Smith
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.

David Smith
.. sculpture 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].

David Smith
Gradually [late 1920's] the canvas became the base and the painting was a sculpture.

David Smith
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..

David Smith