Roland David Smith was born on March 9, 1906, in Decatur, Indiana and moved to Paulding, Ohio in 1921, where he attended high school. From 1924 to 1925, he attended Ohio University in Athens and the University of Notre Dame, which he left after two weeks because there were no art courses. In between, Smith took a summer job working on the assembly line of the Studebaker automobile factory in South Bend, Indiana. He then briefly studied art and poetry at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
Moving to New York in 1926, he met the artist Dorothy Dehner (to whom he was married from 1927 to 1952) and, on her advice, joined her painting studies at the Art Students League of New York. Among his teachers were John Sloan and Jan Matulka, who had studied with Hans Hofmann. Matulka introduced Smith to the work of Picasso, Mondrian, Kandinsky, and the Russian Constructivists. In 1929, Smith met John D. Graham, who later introduced him to the welded-steel sculpture of Pablo Picasso and Julio González.
In the Virgin Islands in 1931–32, Smith made his first sculpture from pieces of coral. In 1932, he installed a forge and anvil in his studio at the farm in Bolton Landing on New York's Lake George that he and Dehner had bought a few years earlier. Smith started by making three-dimensional objects from wood, wire, coral, soldered metal and other found materials but soon graduated to using an oxyacetylene torch to weld metal heads, which are probably the first welded metal sculptures ever made in the United States.
In 1940, the Smiths distanced themselves from the New York art scene and moved permanently to Bolton Landing, where he ran his sculpture studio like a factory, stocked with large amounts of raw material. The artist would put his sculptures in what is referred to as an upper and lower field, and sometimes he would put them in rows, "as if they were farm crops." [From "David Smith (sculptor)," Wikipedia.]
