“People ask me where these come from...”
“I've loved airplanes and flight since I was a kid - I wanted to fly so bad - the occasional flying dream was both a treat and a heartbreak. I built so many model airplanes as a kid that my parents, worried about the obsessive nature of this, told me I couldn't bring any more into the house.
“But what mostly feeds my artwork are my daydreams. I need huge amounts of time alone, and I use it walking, biking, sailing, or making the sculptures. Whether we’re talking about planes, birds, fish, or even a flower opening out, there is a sequence of movements, a process. For flowers, there's the whole progression of germinating, sprouting up, blossoming, pollinating, and always with the wind blowing around and the sunlight shining through the parts of the flowers.
“In all my pieces, I'm trying, of course, to give a sense of objects moving through and being supported by or buffeted by, the wind or water. Even when they are birds that appear to be just perching statically - I'm hoping to convey the movement of air around the bird and the bird's positioning of itself in response.”
Brad Story is a native of Essex, Massachusetts. After graduating from college in 1969, Story returned home to work with his father, celebrated shipbuilder Dana Story, in the family shipyard. The Storys had been building boats in Essex since the 1660s and the business was in young Story’s blood, but after nearly thirty years working in the yard, Brad gave it up. He turned then to designing and building three-dimensional works of art that combine his fascination with airplanes, birds and boat building.
Using nature as his point of departure and materials such as wood and fiberglass, Story creates sculptures that capture our imaginations and lift our spirits. As one critic observed, his works “conjure scenes from the Daedalus’ feather-and-wax myth to Leonardo’s drawings for an ornithopter, to the one-man gliders constructed Otto Lilienthal in the 1890s.”
