David Smith Quotes

Roland David Smith was an American abstract expressionist sculptor and painter, best known for creating large steel abstract geometric sculptures. Wikipedia

✵ 9. March 1906 – 23. May 1965

David Smith: 24 quotes 2 likes

Famous David Smith Quotes

“.. 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”

David Smith

the ancient sites and museums in Italy
from his notes 'Report on Voltri', shortly after 1962, about making his huge sculptures in Voltri, 1962
1960s, The Fields of David Smith,' (1999)

“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.”

David Smith

1950s, Tradition and Identity' (1959)

“In particular, this question, to the sculptor:
If a drawing is traced, even with the greatest precision, from another drawing, you will perceive that the one is a copy. Although the differences may deviate less than half a hair, recognizable only by perceptual sensitivity, unanimously we rule the work of the intruder's hand as non-art.
But where is the line of true art—when the sculptor's process often introduces the hands of a plaster caster, the mold maker, the grinder and the polisher, and the patina applier, all these processes and foreign hands intruding deviations upon what was once the original work?”

David Smith

1950s
Source: 'Questions to Students', one from a long list of questions, in an undated typescript among the David Smith Papers; probably written c. 1953-54; as quoted at website David Smith State http://www.davidsmithestate.org/statements.html

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

David Smith

in his notes for an article, 1951
Source: 1950s, from 'Abstract Expressionism' (1990), p. 159

“[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 ]”

David Smith

In an interview with w:David Sylvester (1960), edited for BBC broadcasting: first published in 'Living Arts', April 1964; as quoted in Interviews with American Artists, by David Sylvester; Chatto & Windus, London 2001, p. 8
1960s

“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

1940s, The Question – What is your Hope' (c. 1940s)

David Smith Quotes about art

“There is no unity or organisation or even aesthetic unity [in Abstract Expressionism / w:New York School (art), but we do have a very strong bond in our defense, but we also are strongest in our own individual identity. Our effort, I think, is all shooting off in independent directions. And the artists themselves will not admit to the existence of the New York School. They won't admit to any classification, and most of those painters known as Abstract Expressionists are the first to say they are not.”

David Smith

In an interview with w:David Sylvester (1960), edited for BBC broadcasting: first published in 'Living Arts', April 1964; as quoted in Interviews with American Artists, by David Sylvester; Chatto & Windus, London 2001, p. 12
1960s

“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.”

David Smith

1950s, Tradition and Identity' (1959)

“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

In an interview with w:David Sylvester (1960), edited for BBC broadcasting: first published in 'Living Arts', April 1964; as quoted in Interviews with American Artists, by David Sylvester; Chatto & Windus, London 2001, p. 10
1960s

David Smith Quotes

“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

1950s, Tradition and Identity' (1959)

Way

“Gravitation is the only logical factor a sculptor has to contend with.”

David Smith

1950s

“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

1950s, Tradition and Identity' (1959)

Men

“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

1950s, Tradition and Identity' (1959)

Imagination , Nature , Parting , Painting

“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

1940s, The Question – What is your Hope' (c. 1940s)

Peace , Water

“this vision cannot be of a single mind – a single concept, it is a small tooth in the gear of man..
.. which to each man, one at a time, offers a marvel of close communion”

David Smith

1940s, The Question – What is your Hope' (c. 1940s)

Time

“Possibly steel is so beautiful because of all the movement associated with it, its strength and functions... Yet it is also brutal: the rapist, the murderer and death-dealing giants are also its offspring.”

David Smith

quote, early 1950's
Source: 1950s, from 'Abstract Expressionism' (1990), p. 40

Death , Beauty , Quotes

“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.”

David Smith

1960s, The Fields of David Smith,' (1999)

Understanding , Question

“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

1960s, The Fields of David Smith,' (1999)

Boy , Cry

“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”

David Smith

1940s, The Question – What is your Hope' (c. 1940s)

Peace , Time

“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

1950s, Tradition and Identity' (1959)

Dreams , Travel , Feeling , Question

“An arrogant independence to create is my only motivation.”

David Smith

Selden Rodman, Conversations With Artists, 1957
1950s

Motivation

“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.”

David Smith

quote, early 1950's
Source: 1950s, from 'Abstract Expressionism' (1990), p. 41

Quotes

“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.”

David Smith

1960s, The Fields of David Smith,' (1999)

“.. that men could view as natural, without reverence or awe but to whom such things were natural
because they were statements of peaceful pursuit – and joined in the phenomenon of life”

David Smith

1940s, The Question – What is your Hope' (c. 1940s)

Life , Men , Peace , Nature

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