Born in Decatur, Indiana, Smith initially pursued painting, receiving training at the Art Students League in New York from 1926 to 1930.

In the early phase of his career, he crafted welded metal constructions that incorporated industrial objects, foreshadowing later developments in sculpture.

Notably, Smith cultivated strong friendships with renowned Abstract Expressionist painters, including Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell, illustrating the interplay between different art forms during this period.

These massive pieces of the 1960s are considered precursors to the minimal "primary structures" that emerged later in the decade, further exemplifying Smith's forward-thinking approach to sculpture.

Roland David Smith was born on March 9, 1906, in Decatur, Indiana and moved to Paulding, Ohio in 1921, where he attended high school.

His mother was a school teacher and a devout Methodist; his father was a telephone engineer and part-time inventor, who fostered a reverence for machinery in Smith.

[4] Smith's early friendship with painters such as Adolph Gottlieb and Milton Avery was reinforced during the Depression of the 1930s, when he participated in the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project in New York.

[8] To create the Forgings, he cut, plugged, flattened, pinched and bent each steel bar, later polishing, rusting, painting, lacquering or waxing its surface.

Finally, in the late 1950s Smith began using spray paint - then still a new medium - to create stenciled shapes out of negative space, in works closely tied to his late-career turn toward geometric planes and solids.

The February 1960 issue of Arts magazine was devoted to Smith's work; later that year he had his first West Coast exhibition, a solo show at the Everett Ellin Gallery in Los Angeles.

Not yet finished with the themes he developed, he had tons of steel shipped from Italy to Bolton Landing, and over the next 18 months he made another 25 sculptures known as the Voltri-Bolton series.

The sculptures in this series are made of stainless steel with a hand-brushed finish reminiscent of the gestural strokes of Abstract Expressionist painting.

The Cubi works consist of arrangements of geometric shapes, which highlight his interest in balance and the contrast between positive and negative space.

His subjects encompassed the figure and landscape, as well as gestural, almost calligraphic marks made with egg yolk, Chinese ink and brushes and, in the late 1950s, the "sprays".

These works make use of delicate tracery rather than solid form, with a two-dimensional appearance that contradicts the traditional idea of sculpture in the round.

As with many artists from the Modernist period, including Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, much of Smith's early work was heavily influenced by Surrealism.

His own descriptions give a vivid picture of the medals and strongly express condemnation of these acts, such as this statement about Propaganda for War (1939–40): The rape of the mind by machines of death – the Hand of God points to atrocities.