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For the last several years my sculptural work has become largely kinetic and interactive. It is often witty, profound and provocative. Much of it seems to exist in the realm of the unlikely. These days, my mind is in a whirl, trying to understand how to make very complicated things appear to be smooth, slow and coordinated.

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Apples and Oranges . . .




In the constant struggles of un-listening self-righteousness that surround us, we see this situation over and over again. I found this antique glueing clamp in New Orleans last week. Later that day, and on the table where I was eating lunch there was an orange. My grand daughter Isabela asked why I had placed the orange in the clamp. Prompted by that simple question, the answer came to me right then and there. She is nine years of age and understood perfectly, also right then and there! Thank you, Isabela.

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Artists' Talk and Closing Reception this Friday



Please join Virginia Fitzgerald and me for the closing reception of our exhibition at
 Regis College's Carney Gallery.  

Friday, August 24, 2012

continuum . . .


This newest piece explores what sometimes feels like an endless effort, sometimes in pursuit of stability and often in pursuit of other values and resources and in the face of an enormous amount of evidence refuting its effectiveness . . .

Pictured here are soldiers receding back into the earth eventually to be brought back yet again as infants, hope springing eternal . . .






Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Marion loved to dance . . .



This is the latest in a series of sculptures based on antique crutches.  It is intended as a commentary on the importance of optimism and maintaining a vital spirited attitude about life.  My mother Marion had both.  She remained that way until the very end of her life.  May it ever be thus . . .

Friday, June 29, 2012

Martin's brush




This broken part a barn yard broom came from Martin Mac's dooryard in Ballybreen, Kilfenora and worked its way into this piece.  Just the tips of the bristles were sticking out of the mud, but enough to catch my attention.  May it ever be thus . . .

In mid - July it was awarded a blue ribbon in the members show at South Shore Art Center in Cohasset.  Ya' just never know . . .

Thursday, April 5, 2012

"WRAPTURE" lifts off at UMASS Lowell

video

The 20th ANNIVERSARY SHOW at UMass Lowell opened last evening and runs through April 26th.

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

LIFE LINE














This weathered and worn birdhouse came my way through a friend, Tom Belote who was cleaning his basement where he had placed it after it fell down in his yard. He thought of me doing something with it, and eventually, that I did. I have an enormous collection of prescription bottles that I have been saving since 2004 after having had a stroke. One thing led to another and then it came together yesterday. Although it is hard to see, the nails that held the front on to the gable end are all that remain at that surface. I was largely unaware of them until I was removing my hand from inside while I was arranging the bottles. Odd, that some of the meds were for Warfarin, a blood thinner. The ring of nails suddenly struck me as a crown of thorns. I'm sure there will be more revelations coming!


Friday, March 23, 2012

School Days








There should have been no surprise. Martin seemed to be related in one way or another to almost everyone, or at least he had met someone related to one person or another. Like the time we went to visit his brother Danny at the rehab ward the Ennis Hospital after hours. He may have said hello to Danny of they may have simply exchanged nods from across the room; but it wasn't long before Martin was down at the far end of the ward chatting it up with some poor fellow who was bored to tears for having been there for weeks with hardly a visitor and that day, being Sunday, the ward was filled with friends and family.

Martin and this chap seemed determined to find out who they both knew in common. Back and forth it went, whether this or that person had black hair or maybe it used to be black but now he had none at all, in an effort to make it into the same person. Well, neither of them could hear very well, so the entire floor reaped the benefit of their negotiations. The more they described the attributes of their so-and-so friend, the further apart they got. "Well, my friend was tall and always wore a knit cap", and "no, because my friend was shorter and rarely wore anything but a brown jacket." Well, wouldn't you know it but half an hour later, it turned out that they were talking about the same man! It always seemed to come around . . . and so it went throughout the ward until it was time to go. I'm not sure that Martin and Danny ever spoke before we left an hour later.

So the following week when we were up at Saint Brigid's well, there was hardly a headstone left unscrutinized or that failed to be commented upon, and there were a lot of headstones! But at the very back of the cemetery there was one in particular that held Martin's attention. Flaherty was the name. He kept coming back to it.

Now, it is quite common to find bits and pieces of small finger and toe bones and the occasional tooth that had worked its way to the surface, what with the subsequent diggings and buryings in the older family plots over the years.

Martin had become somewhat stiff as the years went on and I noticed that of late, he didn't turn his head, exactly. He tended to shuffle around to face things and his whole body took new aim, pipe and all as one unit. Flaherty's headstone continued to draw him back. His mind was working.

Slowly he bent down to retrieve something quite small. We couldn't see exactly what it was, but we were sure that all would be revealed by the wise Professor in due time. He examined the item quite carefully as he rolled it over and over between his tobacco stained fingers. Quietly he turned towards the headstone and eventually back to us. Pointing to the name on the stone, he proclaimed the words "Flaherty, Michael Flaherty . . ." Holding out his find, he presented a tooth, and a bad one at that. "I went to school with him", he announced. "He had bad teeth then too!" There was a long pause. With a flick of the thumb the tooth was airborn, back to the stone curbed plot which was mostly covered with gravel, weeds and plastic flowers.

We departed in silence, our witness having been borne.

David A. Lang

2012

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

IN GENTLER TIMES














This slide show is a preview of the exhibit at The Concord Art Association titled "In Gentler Times" which opens April 1st - April 29th. Reception April 14, 2 - 4pm. This the culmination of work that I began in Ireland in 1994. Click here to view.

Thursday, December 8, 2011

FLIGHTS of FANCY - the Importance of Play













FLIGHTS OF FANCY - The Importance of Play

"Wisdom begins in wonder" - Socrates

Many great thinkers say that the best ideas come from mistakes or from just playing around. In our goal oriented society we often lose contact with the paths of play, creativity and self-led imagination. Three artists and colleagues, Virginia Fitzgerald, David A. Lang and Carl Staley come together with an unusual and stimulating collaboration of their work, each flowing from the importance of Play. Sometimes serious, sometimes playful and sometimes political, the work of these three artists leaves you with much to carry away.

OPENING FEBRUARY 23rd, 2012 at the AMAZING THINGS ART CENTER, Framingham, MA





Brighter ideas . . .


This is a new piece that has been brewing for a while. I'm not sure what the wood clamp was used for. I found it in the barn of an abandoned farm in Vermont on the weekend of David Brewster's 50 Birthday. The bulb is old, from the 1930's and will light and pulsate the nearer you get to it. I suppose I will figure out what it is all about at some point.

Sunday, November 6, 2011

"after Edvard . . . "


This is a detail of one of the new pieces going to the Boston Sculptors Gallery "Sculpture Scoop" which goes public at 5 pm on tuesday!





Saturday, November 5, 2011

"SCULPTURE SCOOP 2011"




"To have and to hold . . . " is a new piece of sculpture that will be at the Boston Sculptors Gallery this tuesday at 5 pm for a special fundraiser opening for collectors. Are you one of those fine people???

Monday, October 17, 2011

Duckweed . . .



Virginia's Fitzgerald's recent image on facebook "Photoaday" of two ducks brings to mind one of those extended moments as a 12 year old growing up on the north shore of long island amidst randomly scattered truck farms. There were several ways of getting to my friend Tom's house: cross-country or by walking the bendy roads. If the corn was taller then two feet, it was easier by road than cutting through the fields diagonally. Of course once the corn stalks had been stacked into tee pee type affairs and gathered in and tied about five feet from the ground, there were all sorts of other adventures at our fingertips. One afternoon I strayed a bit from one of my normal routes and it was along one of the bendy roads. That's when I discovered a seemingly abandoned and overgrown clay tennis courts just inside a stone wall and sure to cut my travel time in half. With one energetic bolt I was half way over the wall and still in mid-air, on the way down a perfectly executed arch, that in a fleeting moment of foreshadowing my future seemed to hang in the balance. As my feet penetrated the smooth clay court, which I was just beginning to understand as a deck of Duckweed, my life passed before me . . . I remember that moment to this day 58 years later as if it had happened but three minutes ago.


Thursday, October 6, 2011


Looking up with Amelia

Amelia and Paul are almost five now. They are two of my grandchildren. They look at everything, and they mostly look at things differently from the way I do, but not always.

A friend has been helping me clean and organize the studio for the past several months, so it comes with little surprise that I can rarely find things yet. She asks "is this Art, tools, an upcoming project or garbage?" "Wait a second . . . there have to be fifty categories either side of center in that line up!" The conversation is generally pretty much the same. So when she approached me with a tiny Lego Person asking where it should be filed, I held my ground. "Oh, him. I would like to put him on the second from the top shelf on the cabinet over there." . . . pause . . ."well that's where I got him!" Ok, let's stop right here!

When Paul and Amelia come to the shop, they always check to see that things are about where they remember them being the last time they were over. Important stuff, like Barbie doll body parts, toy truck parts, hand painted ponies that my friend Harriet made for me four years ago, and so on and so on.

Well, Mr. Lego, standing sentry duty from the second shelf down on the cabinet over there, looks at things quite differently than from Amelia's point of view and from mine, too. And he looks different to Amelia than he does to me. For Amelia the whole world looks quite different from three feet high rather than from my eye level. Mr. Lego seems to be off somewhere wandering the studio these days. He is not on the second shelf down from the top on the cabinet over there right now. But at the very least, he has taught me to remember to look from way down low, or from upside down or from any way other that the way that I normally would, whatever normal is for me! And therein lies a different answer, or at the very least a different question. Thanks Amelia! Oh, yeah, and Amelia brings me chocolate chip cookies!

Friday, September 30, 2011

Rack 'em up!



Rack 'em up! is a kinetic piece that I built several years ago. I am just now getting around to posting images of it. The tray slowly rocks back and forth and sideways giving free reign to the balls to find their position. In so doing, it creates a wonderful random knocking cascade of clunks. I hope to post a video of its movements soon.

Monday, September 26, 2011

"OK, Now What?" comes down this Sunday evening.




‎"OK, NOW WHAT?" comes down this sunday evening. It has been quite an exciting ride! If you have a chance to see it it is still open Wednesday through Sunday the 2nd of October. The attendance has been tremendous; kids, parents, relatives, engineers, writers, other artists and many new friends. Thank you for coming in and getting involved!

Friday, September 23, 2011

ONE WEEK TO GO!



"OK, Now What?" has one week to go, closing on October 2nd, 2011.

Attendance has been superb throughout. This young woman was photographing "The Play by Play" at last sunday's open studios.

Monday, September 19, 2011

OPEN STUDIOS WEEKEND in SoWa



One of the remarkable things that happened this weekend took place when a family arrived at the gallery mid-afternoon on Sunday. I was introduced to a former painter who had lost her sight several years ago. With her permission, I slowly walked her over to one of the kinetic pieces and ever so gently placed her hands in mine and over the the piece named "Daedelus." For a while I sensed that she was seeing the wheels, the moving parts and the paper wings as they moved under her delicate touch. I am not sure about what she felt, but I do now that only rarely have I been so moved . . . Thank you for enriching my life.

Saturday, September 10, 2011

HEY BOB and TWITTERING MACHINE




It just finally occurred to me that "Hey Bob, are you thee . . .?" carries such a strong resemblance to Paul Klee's 1922 image of "The Twittering Machine." I first saw this image at the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard in 1965. I often think of it and refer others to it, but until I took the outer shells of "Hey Bob" off and photographed it in motion I hadn't seen the connection between the two works. Duh !


Friday, September 9, 2011

from this month's ArtScope . . .



David Lang: OK, NOW WHAT? Inventions, Contraptions and Flights of Fancy
James Foritano


I thought of Brancusi. Both because Brancusi’s driven essentialism reminded me, by opposition, of David Lang’s Byzantine indirection and because, after driving through hellacious heat from Cambridge to Lang’s Natick outpost, I deserved some high-flying reference to begin my disquisition.


Lang was no help. His references were Mickey Rooney, Monty Python and Rachel Carson. Hmm… Rachel Carson? Perhaps later.


If Brancusi’s iconic “Bird in Space” speaks of Modernism’s search for pure essence, David Lang’s post-modernism follows pure plumbing, the sleek guts of the essential. His kinetic sculpture lofts icons, wishes, perverse puns (not to mention various unmentionables) above a fantasy of copper wire twisted into a concatenation of crank-shafts, pinion gears, cams… which do, when the viewer’s body breaks a light-beam, actually grind into mesmerizing 3-volt motion.


Take the unforgivable “The Swine Flew.” In the crowded distances of Lang’s studio, you spot their white wings and, as you move closer, hoping against hope, three pinkly porcine bodies do actually take flight. Under feathered wings as flexible as wishes, gaping maws, and limbs rigid with ecstasy, they climb hillocks of air so effortlessly that they, and you, have forgotten the complication of engineering that underpins them. Until you move away, thus breaking the dazzle of motion and exposing the “machina” of these porcine deities: a scribble of still, copper wiring.


So don’t expect slick surfaces á la Brancusi, or oodles of slick, modernist angst either. Expect yards of anecdote, tumbling back on itself until, leaning toward a speaker poised too casually against a cracker barrel, his audience, us, imagines, maybe hopes, that he’s lost his point in untraceable divagation. And then… it’s there.


Take “The Castinetti Sisters.” A syncopation of clams clap their shells, talking clam-talk as we lean closer to eavesdrop, and then we glimpse, within each clacking confine, a nude, reclining. The Castinetti sisters appear and disappear like an advert in neon against a night sky. Like that Renaissance guy’s Venus de Milo, all blond nudity, coasting toward shore forever, on the elegant flutes of a scallop shell, on a racing cursive of wavelets, breaking, breaking… but never arriving.


So take the Castinetti sisters, ya dummy! They’re available! Or, take those bedpans your approach shifts into tilting flight, but… watch out! Or take a listen to those authentic American voices in “Play by Play” as a crowd of vacuum tubes transforms to organ pipes sounding the lilting, urgent vernacular of old-time sportscasters.

Read the entire article in our magazine pages...

Monday, September 5, 2011

Jean Pratt




F
or many years now I have been in love with Jean Pratt. On thursday evening the traffic out from Boston was horrendous. It took me 2 hours and 40 minutes to get from the Boston Sculptors Gallery to my driveway in Wayland. I can often make the trip in 25 minutes. Getting TO the gallery took 1 hour and 40 minutes. Well, that morning the Boston Globe had an article about the show. Imagine my surprise when I walked into the gallery and standing there was Jean Pratt herself, having braved the same traffic. I was at her 90th birthday party two years ago; and here she is in her usual glory, all the way from Wayland to see the show! It doesn't get much better than that!!! Thank you Jean.

Sunday, September 4, 2011

Daedelus, on the other hand . . .



This beautiful image was taken this past friday at the Boston Sculptors Gallery by Richard Olken during a rare 3minute interval while the sun was reflecting off the floor in the next gallery. As Daedelus' wings slowly lifted him skyward, the shadows projected onto the wall. It was another of those splendid serendipitous moments. Thank you Richard!

Friday, September 2, 2011

SouthEndPatch review

Here is a little teaser from a review in SouthEndPatch. To see more, click here.

SoWa Spotlight On: David Lang

Somewhat of a Renaissance man, Lang's upcoming show at the Boston Sculptors Gallery is not to be missed.

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Growing up on the North Shore of Long Island amid multiple truck farms gave artist David Langan unusual playground, from which he developed a passion for rummaging and a lifelong interest in old buildings, abandoned machinery and farm equipment. Lang and his brother learned early on that the possibilities were limitless for what could be made with their hands and a little imagination, fostered by a father that was part engineer, part inventor.

Combining a BS in Biology (Fairfield University) and some art schooling (Paier School of Art), Lang arrived in Massachusetts for graduate studies at MGH and Harvard Medical School, channeling his dual skill-set into the art of medical illustration. He went on to develop the Scientific Illustration Department at Harvard and stayed there until 1972 when he left to become the Art Department Chair at the Middlesex School. Lang retired from teaching in 2003 andopened his studio in Natick.

Lang is a watercolor painter, sculptor, photographer, writer, musician, flight instructor and stroke survivor. At the end of this month he’ll mount an innovative and unusual show at theBoston Sculptors Gallery in SoWa.

Patch: Tell us about this show--how did it come together?

David Lang: This upcoming show is primarily ‘KINETIC SCULPTURE.’ This all began after the stroke. I found it difficult to draw and paint for several years, but was able to conceive of and build mechanical sculpture. The wheels that appear in much of my work have come to represent the passage of time. Some are large, and others are somewhat smaller, but they’re all very delicate and quite elegant.

Much of the work is narrative and explores the unlikelihood of day to day events and celebrates the unexpected. For example, "The Day the Castinetti Sisters First Learned to Fly" presents five flying clams on exceedingly delicate paper wings that slowly open and drop shut suddenly, or "Hey Bob, Are You There?" which presents five barnacles debating the merits of staging an ‘evolution.’

I’ve been working on these themes for seven years now, and continually drawing from life experiences and the events that surround us on a day to day basis. Although I would not have thought so, I have discovered that quite a bit of my work has a quiet political voice. . . . . . .