Sculptor killed in freak accident recalled as a generous mentor
A man who was killed after a deer was thrown into his windshield was a respected sculptor known for combining technical expertise with flights of fancy.
David A. Lang, 76, died when his vehicle flipped over after a deer struck by another vehicle was thrown into Lang’s car shortly before 5:30 p.m. Wednesday in Weston.
Yesterday, local artists mourned the passing of a man they described by turns as a gifted artist and a generous mentor.
“I loved him so much, I can’t even mourn,” said Sally Fine, a Brewster sculptor who met Lang through the Boston Sculptors Gallery. “We’re all thinking of him flying up there with paper wings.”
Because his father was an engineer, there were often “things strewn around the house,” Fine said, so at a very early age, Lang “started pulling things apart and putting them back together.”
In 1964, he moved to the Boston area and began work as a medical illustrator at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School as part of a three-year post-graduate program, his wife, Kathleen Lang, said.
By the following year, he was working as a scientific illustrator at Harvard University’s chemistry department, she said, and from 1972 to 2003 he taught art and print making at the Middlesex School in Concord.
He began sculpting while he was working there, and many of his works were exhibited at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln and the Boston Sculptors Gallery. But even while his career flourished, Lang always made time to help other artists.
Christina Zwart, a fellow Wayland sculptor, recalled getting in touch with Lang in 2011 after being turned away from a Needham electronics shop she had gone to, looking for a mechanism that would make a horseshoe crab’s tail move back and forth over a photograph of a female crab laying her eggs.
“He said, ‘Well, come on over,’ ” Zwart remembered, “and he dropped everything he was doing and worked on it for at least two hours. I submitted the piece to the Cambridge Art Association; it got in and won an award.”