David Smith

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

"Art has its tradition, but it is a visual heritage. The artists 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."

"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. [quote, early 1950s]"

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

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

"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."

"According to my mother, Jean Freas [David Smiths second wife], Australia [he made in 1951] was the first to be placed squarely in the center of the field beyond the house. David Smith was well aware that Australia, with its fluid gestures of a long arm swinging gracefully, was an extremely important piece, heralding a new era for his work. It represented a culmination of his sinuous use of metal and the technique of drawing in space. Thus planted, Australia drew not just in any space--such as the impartial space of a museum gallery -- but in the specific landscape of Bolton Landing."

"I dont 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"

"An arrogant independence to create is my only motivation."

"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"

"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 1950s]"

"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.."