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How did David Smith begin to use metal as his medium? What were his sources of inspiration? (2 big paragraphs)

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David Smith moved into metal gradually out of a background as a painter and a practical familiarity with machines and tools. Trained originally in drawing and painting, he began to assemble three-dimensional work by combining found pieces of metal and discarded machine parts, learning to cut and join steel himself rather than relying on traditional carving or casting methods. Working with scrap—automobile parts, rails, beams and other industrial detritus—he taught himself, experimented with welding and grinding, and developed a direct, hands-on technique that treated welded steel much as a painter treats a canvas: building form through additive, gestural acts. Over time his studio practice and the availability of heavier materials allowed him to move from small assemblages to the large, freestanding welded sculptures for which he is best known.

Smith’s inspiration came from a mix of modernist art, the industrial world, and the rural landscape around him. Because he had been a painter, he absorbed the formal lessons of Cubism and other European modern movements and admired sculptors who pioneered welding and metalwork; he was particularly attentive to artists who treated metal as a plastic medium. At the same time the shapes, joints and textures of machines, farm implements and factory fabrication supplied him with both raw material and formal vocabulary, so that industrial parts became a source of line, plane and rhythm. Nature and the open spaces of his upstate New York studio site also informed scale and placement, and he combined these influences—modernist abstraction, found industrial forms and an essentially painterly concern with surface and gesture—to produce work that feels simultaneously mechanical, architectural and intimately hand-made.