Paul Smith: British Sculptor

Hey, I wonder if you could, um, tell the audience just a little bit about your journey in clay, like where you started in clay, and I'm, I'm always very intrigued with that.

Some people start off at school, of course, and some people find clay with a different path.

H- how about you?

That's a whole lifetime.

[laughs]

[laughs]

Uh, I guess the first time I remember clay, [laughs] it sounds a bit of a, a cliché, but, um, I lived in London at the time, and I was, I was, um, I was only six or seven or so.

And, um, I went into the garden and dug up the clay soil and started to play around with it.

Um, and then Plasticine, um, came around, and, uh, I'd make lots of animal sculptures, but I didn't call them sculptures then.

They were toys, of course, but, uh-

Yeah, yeah

...

but using Plasticine.

Um, and there would be little balls of Plasticine all over the carpet.

So-

[laughs]

...

it used to drive my mom mad, but, uh...

And then after that, the pottery room was, was my happy place at school.

So I made lots of what I thought were realistic human and animal figures.

But of course, looking back on it now, they were [laughs] they were quite naive.

But, uh, I, I think, you know, I had some sort of a raw talent there.

So I applied for art college and got in, so I did a, a fine art sculpture course, which, um, really opened my eyes to the whole history of art, not just that sort of trying to get realism, which is what I was doing before.

Um, and, uh, I was influenced by sort of the whole of art history, I suppose.

It's a, it's a really...