Thursday, May 31, 2007

Lego


Artist Nathan Sawaya started out going to law school and was a practicing attorney for several years. When he would unwind at the end of a stressful day - he would do so by making sculptures and portraits out of.... Lego! These days, he is a full-time Lego-artist, and his works are at the same time fun and remarkable.

"I try to take Lego in a direction it has never been before - making large sculptures that will be on a museum tour for the next few years". From a almost-true-to-scale Lego representation of the Iwo Jima memorial to a piece called blue, where a seated figure made of exclusively blue Lego pieces could be perceived as either taking himself apart or putting himself together, and from a huge Monopoly game to a piece commissioned by the New Orleans Public Library after Hurrican Katrina - 1.5 million bricks in his studio, and Sawaya estimates he spends about $200,000 in Lego pieces per year.

CNN did a fun report this week on Nathan Sawaya and his work, and maybe because it is such an unusual medium, it is worth seeing and something I would love to see in real life. And what a fun job!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Lego was my favorite toy growing up. I made my first computer out of Lego. It was almost as fast as the actual computers of its time. How great is is to see someone express life through such an interesting medium as lego.