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Lawrence Reading To His Child
Rothbort senses ancient and hidden qualities in a certain piece of wood and will finger and study it for several days before he attempts to bring something out of it. He actually tries to get the wood to express itself. He wants the wood to use his talents to work out the creation that has been in it for centuries. One of his sculptures is from the trunk of a tree that stood in front of his house until a gale brought it crashing down on his roof. "I never use the commercial material that most sculptors ordinarily use," he says. "I pick up my material fieldstone and sandstone from the fields, free stone and brownstone from the city lots, driftwood and raftwood from the ocean shores, old barn doors and fence posts from farmland. I use anything decayed where time has left its mark. By carving these materials, I feel myself as a part of nature, and the subject is born directly out of the material."
New York Herald Tribune - Sunday, November 7, 1965
The first six images are from the book, Samuel Rothbort - published by The Chassidic Art Institute, 1996
The Football Pile-Up Cop On The Beat
Mr. Rothbort uses tree trunks, old gate posts and driftwood for his medium and finds in their forms and texture which exposure has given them the suggestions for the forms which he carves. The results are imaginative and evocative because of the suggestions that they have been released from their material that confined them.
-Brooklyn Daily Eagle, November 19, 1933
Cockfight Feeding Her Young
"Best of all, however, are the sculptures. They are extraordinary ! Cut out of tree roots or chunks of stone, they're near abstract in form, yet, at the same time, most poetic and even spiritual."
-New York World Telegram, November 7, 1942
Harmonica Player Chirping Sparrows
"...sculpture...imaginative... mystical results seem weathered out of them rather than controlled by the chisel..."
-New York Herald-Tribune, November 15, 1942
Embraced In Love Wheat
...sculpture... more quality and creative imagination than you'll find in a raft of so-called important sculpture exhibitions. He depicts a pair of dancers and they're like the movement of wind; or a crowd of subway straphangers, and they are as dehumanized as so many wooden pins jammed in a box; or a sleeping bull, and it is the very incarnation of brute strength."
-New York Herald-Tribune, September 23, 1944
The Fallen Bird Hunger
"The Sculptures on the other hand, are as solid as the paintings are loose. They are carved directly from the stone, with the essential density of the material dictating form, and details kept at a minimum. At the same time the themes are on the weighty serious side. (Comparisons may indeed be odious, but Flannagan is the man who comes to mind here)."
-New York World Telegram, November 16, 1940
Affection Monkeys On A Tree - Sculptured Copper
"Sculpture is in the imaginatively abstract vein. He works in a strictly sculptural language all his own."
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, November 25, 1945
The following excerpts are from the book - Out of Wood and Stone, Samuel Rothbort - 1952
The Mosquito
The advertising world floods like rainwater to the sewers. They'll use anything for their purpose. Take baldness. For the past fifty years they've advertised hair tonics to bring up new crops. Any fool knows that not a single full-grown hair has sprouted from all the advertising.
After all, what's bad about a bald head? No growing pains, no barber bills or sanitation problems, and it's the skin you love to touch. But unfortunately, it is also an open field for the mosquito.
I carved the piece of wood merely as a caricature on the modern state of mind.
The Young Naturalist
Here is a block of wood cut out of the condemned trees lying in the city dumps. It may be aspen, poplar or northern cottonwood. I carved my son Larry's portrait when he was at the height of his spiritual and naturalistic studies, wearing long hair and a beard. I didn't dream, that time, that he will turn out a painter. He had just begun to build up his theories, and at the bottom are representative blocks of stone depicting building. There are also symbols of his studies, of the wine grape, the lyric harp, and ever-lasting youth.
The totally direct portrait sculptor, not only observes the model with his eyes, but actually touches the model, and feels with his fingers, and gets the living warmth of the model into the material.