Bolton Landing
In the late 1920s David Smith traveled to Bolton Landing, New York in the Adirondack mountains. Inspired by that initial visit, he purchased 86 acres of land on what used to be a fox farm. Smith built a home and art studios and moved there permanently in 1940. The studio spaces consisted of a metal shop and drawing studio in addition to the expansive outdoors where he would often work, placing his sculptures in the surrounding fields. These arrangements and his ongoing relationship to this landscape profoundly influenced Smith’s art-making practices. The Bolton Landing studio and sculpture workshop became the birthplace of many of Smith’s best-known works.
Today Bolton Landing remains private property. It is closed to the public.
Sculptures in the south field, Bolton Landing, NY. c. 1963. The Estate of David Smith, New York. Photo: David Smith.
Sculpture group in the lower field, Bolton Landing, NY. 1961. The Estate of David Smith, New York. Photo: David Smith.
Sculpture group, Bolton Landing, NY, 1963. The Estate of David Smith, New York. Photo: David Smith
My father put his sculptures in our fields so that he could look at each work in relation to the natural world of the mountains and sky and also to its fellow sculptures. Again and again, he referred to his "work stream"; each work of art being as a vessel filled from the stream while never wholly separate. I understand his term to mean the flow of his identity made physically manifest--the process by which images and ideas from decades or days before inform a work in progress or yet to be made. David Smith's fields as a place for the dialogue between sculptures evolved from his creative process, from an interplay between nature and the artist's own nature. The artist's identity makes its mark as a stream carves its channel into a mountainside.
- Candida Smith
I would like to make a sculpture that would rise from
water and tower in the air—
that carried conviction and vision that had not existed before
that rose from a natural pool of clear water
to sandy shores with rocks and plants
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