Latest news with #LaMontagne
The Citizen
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Citizen
Candle making, markets and quizzing – upcoming events to look out for
Candle making, markets and quizzing – upcoming events to look out for 23 May – Candle making workshop at Artworx Craft Shop from 2-4pm. R450pp. Contact Allison at 0715120420. 24 May – Join the 1-hour parkrun at Hazelmere Dam, Holla Trails or Tinley Manor from 8-9am. Run, walk or jog while taking in the views. Weather dependent. 25 May – Beach clean up at Zimbali long beach from 8-10am. Bring own gloves and a water bottle. 28 May – Night Quiz at La Montagne from 6-9pm. Enjoy tasty food and drink specials plus exciting prizes to be won. Free entry. 29 May – The Ballito Writers' Group meeting at the Ballito Library at 10.30am. Speakers will address 'publishing in South Africa'. Free entry. Refreshments served. Contact Peter at 083 441 1950. 31 May – Saturday Market Day at Odyssey Shopping Mall from 9am-2pm. WhatsApp 0837905020 to book a stall. – Catch the magic of Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again on the big screen at Sugar Rush Park. Tickets R100pp. Gates open at 5.30pm. No under 13s allowed. 06 June – Join the Autism Foundation NPO at the 3rd Ballito Father's Day Golf Challenge for Charity at the Zimbali Lakes Ernie Els Signature Golf Course. Limited entries. Call 072 793 1178 for more details. Stay in the loop with The North Coast Courier on Facebook, X, Instagram & YouTube for the latest news. Mobile users can join our WhatsApp Broadcast Service here or if you're on desktop, scan the QR code below. At Caxton, we employ humans to generate daily fresh news, not AI intervention. Happy reading!
New York Times
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Armand LaMontagne, Meticulous Sculptor of Sports Greats, Dies at 87
Armand LaMontagne, a Rhode Island sculptor who carved 2,000-pound blocks of laminated basswood into life-size renderings of larger-than-life sports figures like Babe Ruth and Ted Williams — two of which, like the players they depicted, ended up in the Baseball Hall of Fame — died on March 7 at his home in North Scituate, R.I. He was 87. His daughter, Lisa LaMontagne, said the cause was heart failure. Mr. LaMontagne began earning a place in the hearts of New England's rabid fan base in the 1980s with his painstakingly detailed representations of beatified Boston Hall of Famers like Ted Williams and Carl Yastrzemski of the Red Sox, Bobby Orr of the Bruins and Larry Bird of the Celtics. 'In one of the great sports regions on the planet, Armand LaMontagne immortalized its sporting heroes in a way that was equal to that of the accomplishments of his subjects,' Richard Johnson, the curator of the Sports Museum, located in TD Garden, the home of the Celtics and Bruins, said in an interview. One of Mr. LaMontagne's best-known works is one sure to cause anguish among those who consider Fenway Park their summer home. His sculpture of Babe Ruth, the Boston Red Sox star whom the team owner, Harry Frazee, famously — or infamously — sold off to the New York Yankees in 1920, was unveiled in all its pinstriped glory in August 1984 at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. As noted in a 2020 profile of Mr. LaMontagne in The Athletic, the sports site now owned by The New York Times, Red Sox fans could breathe a sigh of relief when his rendering of Williams, commissioned by the Sox owner Jean Yawkey, joined the Bambino in the Hall the next summer. (Mr. LaMontagne created another sculpture of Williams in fishing gear to commemorate the man known as the Splendid Splinter's other favorite sport.) Mr. LaMontagne began making his signature sports sculptures studio attached to his house in North Scituate — a replica of a so-called Rhode Island stone ender design from 1680 — which he built himself in 1973. To achieve lifelike results for his wooden sculptures, which were sometimes later cast in bronze, he invited his famous subjects — those who were still alive, at least — in for a fitting of sorts, measuring their arm lengths, thigh circumference and so forth, and then photographed them in an appropriate sporting pose. For Ruth, Mr. LaMontagne worked from photographs, as well a from loaner uniform of his. Tracing the pose from the photograph on a massive block of kiln-dried wood, Mr. LaMontagne then labored for up to 10 months, topping off the work with an acrylic paint job executed to the same exacting degree of detail. (He was also a painter; his portraits of athletes and other notables are on display throughout New England and beyond.) He sometimes had to make his own tools for specialized tasks. As Mr. Johnson put it, 'You can't go to a woodworking store and buy a tool to carve the dimples on a basketball.' (The wooden basketball that his Bird sculpture crouches to shoot had some 4,000 such bumps, or pebbles, his daughter said.) The Celtics unveiled the lumber alter ego of Bird, a foundational star of their three championship teams of the 1980s, during halftime of a home game in February 1988. 'The only thing about Armand, he was all right from the head down to the waist,' Bird recounted at a news conference at the time, 'but when he started beating around with that chisel and hammer down there a little bit lower, I could feel it at night.' Armand Maurice LaMontagne was born on Feb. 3, 1938, in Pawtucket, R.I., the second of eight children of Raymond LaMontagne, a construction superintendent, and Jeanne (Ferland) LaMontagne. He was an all-state fullback for Pawtucket Vocational School before transferring to Worcester Academy in Massachusetts, where he earned a football scholarship to Boston College. Struggling with his studies because of dyslexia, he left college after two years. Following a stint in the Army, he briefly worked as a state trooper before turning to another early love, art, eventually earning a grant to study marble sculpture in Florence, Italy. For years he earned money by making handcrafted period furniture and decorative wood sculptures. His first official sculpture portrait, as he called them, was a likeness of Gen. George S. Patton, the fabled World War II commander, which was unveiled in 1983 at the General George Patton Museum of Leadership at Fort Knox, near Louisville, Ky. In addition to his daughter, Mr. LaMontagne is survived by his wife of 61 years, Lorraine (Robitaille) LaMontagne; his sisters, Lucille Coutu and Anne Gaboriault; and his brother, Henry LaMontagne. As an amiable ex-jock, Mr. LaMontagne established an easy rapport with his luminary subjects. He told The Athletic that Bobby Orr was 'a nice guy when he wasn't playing hockey,' and that Larry Bird 'worried about everything' but was 'a great guy.' Then again, he added, 'They're all nice to the guy who can make them look ugly forever.'
Boston Globe
22-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Remembering sculptor Armand LaMontagne, ‘our enduring star' whose wooden sculpture work commemorated Boston's sporting greats
Dave and I agreed how lucky we'd been to be his friends, while enjoying his company during the period of his greatest creative output, the three decades in which he carved life-size wooden sculptures of General George S. Patton, Babe Ruth, Ted Williams (twice), Larry Bird, Bobby Orr, Carl Yastrzemski, and Harry Agganis. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up We'd even reached out to Bill Russell, as we wanted to honor Boston's greatest champion with a LaMontagne original, but he respectfully declined. I recall that Armand had even selected a pose of Russell balancing on one leg while cradling a rebound, in the split-second before he'd fire a bullet pass to Bob Cousy or Sam Jones at the start of a patented Celtics fast break. Advertisement It had been a little more than six years since I'd seen Armand, and I was aware he'd suffered a series of illnesses. Our last phone chat had been roughly a year ago, when we recalled the many times we'd interacted regarding the five sculptures and half-dozen paintings he'd created for The Sports Museum. I informed him that he was still the star of our exhibits, as visitors often stood in wonder while examining the near-Baroque swirls and almost surgically rendered intricacy of his carvings of items such as Orr's hockey gloves or Bird's high-top sneakers. It reminded me of an encounter I had with Tom Heinsohn in the bowels of the old Boston Garden on the night of the public unveiling of the Bird sculpture. As I stood guard over the draped figure, Heinsohn approached and asked if I could give him a peek at the sculpture. After gazing at it for nearly a minute, he informed me it was just 'pretty good.' Screwing up my courage, I blurted out my immediate reply of, 'Just pretty good … why do you say that?' Advertisement He looked down and pointed to the sculpture's feet and said, 'Well, for starters, he put socks and shoes on a mannequin.' Seizing on the moment, I said that though we normally wouldn't let anyone touch the sculpture, he was, well, Tom Heinsohn, the artist and basketball star, and I told him to run his fingers over both the socks and sneakers and tell me what he thought. I may have been the first person since Red Auerbach to render him speechless, as the look on his face told me all I needed to know about his revised opinion of the artist. Wood sculptures of Celtics great Larry Bird and Bruins great Bobby Orr by Armand LaMontagne are part of the collection at The Sports Museum at TD Garden. Chin, Barry, Globe Staff Photo In like manner, all of Armand's living subjects came to the realization they'd dealt with a gentleman every bit as skilled, talented, and devoted to his chosen profession as they were to theirs. As with many of the best relationships that forged the early history of The Sports Museum, our decades-long relationship with Armand started with Ted Williams before being brought home by Dave Cowens. In the summer of 1986, I was invited to speak at the Rhode Island chapter of the Society for American Baseball Research. The invitation came from my good friend Father Gerry Beirne, who was hosting the gathering at his then-parish of St. Rita's in Warwick, R.I. I recall it was a sunny Saturday on which I turned down an invitation to go sailing with my uncle in Portsmouth, N.H., after nearly literally flipping a coin to make my decision. Advertisement Armand was the first speaker and star attraction, because a year earlier he'd made headlines by carving a life-size wood sculpture of Williams for the National Baseball Hall of Fame. At the Cooperstown unveiling ceremony his rendition of Williams prompted the aging slugger to break down while praising LaMontagne. Not only was an American hero honored in a picture-perfect setting, but a star was born, as news coverage of LaMontagne made national headlines. After acknowledging a brief standing ovation in the packed reception room, he began his remarks by asking if anyone among the assembled knew anything about 'a sports museum in Boston.' My hand shot up as people swerved to observe me (at this point the museum was a year from opening to the public), and Armand replied, 'I want to see you afterwards.' Ninety minutes later, after I spoke of the 1914 Miracle Braves on an afternoon where we also learned of the greatness of Bing Miller, Nap Lajoie, and Gabby Hartnett, Armand asked me to help him get something from the trunk of his vintage Mercedes. As his trunk door lifted, he informed me that he was giving the museum a work of art at the request of Williams. We carefully cradled a long tube of rolled watercolor paper. A sculpture of Larry Bird by Armand LaMontagne (right) is located in the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield. GLOBE STAFF/Thomas James Hurst Back in a quiet corner of the reception hall, we unfurled what was a life-size painted study of the Williams sculpture in Cooperstown. The detail was striking, worthy of any work by Norman Rockwell or Thomas Eakins. It depicted Williams in what he considered his greatest season of 1957, the year in which he batted .388 at the age of 38, striding into a pitch with each measurement of his figure scrawled in pencil. Advertisement Williams had even signed it to Armand with the slightly self-deprecating inscription, 'You even made me look good.' Not only was it the 'blueprint' for the sculpture, as Armand informed me that he clipped it to an easel adjacent to the wood block, but a masterpiece in its own right. I consider it the equal of its three-dimensional twin in Cooperstown, and proof that his artistry is as much of an engineering feat as it is an aesthetic expression. Armand joked that at their first meeting, Williams told him he was expecting to meet an artist in a beret with a French accent. Months later, the two became close enough that when the slugger half-kiddingly complained that work on the sculpture hadn't progressed to his liking, Armand held up his chisel and mallet and suggested that Williams finish it. The former Army vet and Marine fighter pilot became fast friends, and The Sports Museum proudly displays one sculpture of the slugger in his fly-fishing gear to accompany the four Williams painted portraits that are among our treasures. Red Sox great Ted Williams was known for his love of fishing. Chin, Barry, Globe Staff Photo Not long after he'd presented the museum with the study for the Cooperstown sculpture, he asked if we could connect him with Bird in the hope the Celtics star would agree to pose for a sculpture. Cowens reached out to his former teammate that night, and within 48 hours Bird and Cowens drove Larry's pickup down to the artist's studio, where No. 33 agreed to pose. Advertisement Ten months later, that sculpture was unveiled first at a private dinner at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and later prior to a game at Boston Garden. At the Ritz dinner, Bird made brief remarks that included casting a glance to Orr before informing the group he always looked at Orr's retired number banner during the playing of the national anthem to gain inspiration. That Hollywood moment led to Armand's next commission, namely an Orr sculpture, followed two years later by Yastrzemski, the classically rendered Agganis in 1995, and finally the Williams fishing sculpture in 2001. Each have their distinctive characteristics, with Orr captured in a dazzling array of carved and painted details, the torque and grace of Yastrzemski's swing (the subject commenting to LaMontagne that he captured him socking a home run), the classic pose of Agganis (that one critic observed resembled Zeus tossing a thunderbolt from the heavens), and Williams shown in his happy place of the salmon streams of New Brunswick. The ailing slugger saw it weeks before his death in 2002, and declared it his favorite portrait of himself. Like his noted subjects, LaMontagne will be remembered as one of the greats. In the context of art history, that leads to an immediate comparison with Grinling Gibbons, England's master wood sculptor of the late 17th and early 18th centuries whose most noted works reside within London's St. Paul's Cathedral. I recall surprising Armand by comparing him to his artistic counterpart, which made him laugh before replying with a robust, 'That's my guy.' Armand, was, and will forever be, our guy. Richard Johnson has served as curator of The Sports Museum since 1982.
Yahoo
14-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Ray LaMontagne will celebrate 20th anniversary of his debut album at the Orpheum
Singer-songwriter Ray LaMontagne is celebrating the 20th anniversary of his debut album, Trouble. Along with a remastered vinyl release, he'll be hitting the road for a tour that will bring him to the Orpheum Theatre in Downtown Minneapolis on Aug. 31. The tour will have the troubadour playing all of Trouble, from start to finish, for the first time since its release in 2004. "Twenty years. Two decades. That's a lot of water under the bridge," LaMontagne reflected on the anniversary. "Every cell in my body has changed three times over in that time. I have been three times reborn. There are moments in your life when you need to place a marker. Some people think that it is brave, or fearless, to never look back. I don't believe that. For the simple reason that if you never look back, you will never see how far you have come." Elsewhere in the Midwest, the tour will take LaMontagne through Omaha (Aug. 29); Highland Park, Ill. (Aug. 30); and Iowa City, Iowa (Sep. 2). Tickets go on sale March 21 at 10 a.m.
