Trained as a painter, but with early experience working in a car factory, David Smith started making torch-welded metal sculptures in 1933. Over time, his sculptures, which he considered “a poetic statement of form,” became increasingly abstract. Sketches that he drew while traveling by train between New York City and his home in the Adirondack Mountains inspired Hudson River Landscape in 1951. Linear shapes suggest rounded clouds, railroad tracks, and rocky terrain. Arc –Wing, created in the same year, is further distanced from natural or man-made elements. Smith commented on observing nature from an airplane: “three miles up…the view from space makes solid form appear [as just] pattern.” Arc-Wing projects into three dimensions; its configurations and patterning change as the viewer moves around the piece.