Artist Statement

by Joan Halifax Roshi
Founder, Upaya Foundation, Santa Fe NM

Don Smalley Sculpture Artist Portrait

This man does not use the spoken language as a medium for communication.

His word, his world, his art and his mind are expressed in the body of his sculptures.

Years ago he heard the Buddhist phrase, “Only don’t know!”

These words, which in Buddhism might be called a turning phrase, point to the awakening of the non-conceptual mind. This state of mind seems to have opened within Don a state of truth and spontaneity- without formal teachings in the arts or Buddhism or any other spiritual discipline.

His conceptual mind doesn’t interfere with the creative process, or with the mysterious ground of direct understanding that informs his sculpture.

Each moment, each work, can thus be approached with an open and clear mind.

Don does not want his work and his experience to be characterized by language; he chooses to remain free of language, yet in remains in direct conversation with that which is immediately before him. He enters into a dialogue with stone.

Don quietly speaks of times of struggle, and grants that these times have given him determination and strength, turning him towards his own interior consciousness. His ease with solitude and his sense of self-sufficiency have fostered in him an atmosphere of stillness and peace. He speaks of what he has learned from tribal elders, People of the Earth who teach their ways through how they live.

He has learned both silence from them, and a kind of listening that calls forth truth.

He says of stone that in working it, he faces a medium of great strength and hardness. Stone has been his discipline and from stone he has learned control.

When he finishes a piece, he often felt that “it had to be made…” or that it had always been there. Some pieces arise from the deep past, some arise from the ground, or from an image of the future.

Art then, for this man is the practice of timelessness – yet within the literally time consuming process of calling forth the wordless story from stone.

Don Smalley artist in Hawaii beach 

Don Smalley artist in Hawaii

The artist in Hawaii… “Finding my greatest Inspirations.”

about sculptor Don Smalley in studio

The artist in his studio.

about Don Smalley Grand Canyon rim

At the rim of the Grand Canyon