Legos Aren’t Just for Kids: This Artist Tours the World Recreating Famous Paintings With Them
Nathan Sawaya owns 10 million LEGO bricks—a number that doesn’t sound too strange when considering he’s been building entire structures using solely the toy for over a decade.
The 46-year-old sculptor—a self-appointed job title that really does seem like the only way to define his artistry—is the man behind Yellow, the visually striking and widely recognized LEGO sculpture depicting a man tearing his chest open while a barrage of bricks fall out of him. But that’s only one of Sawaya’s many aesthetically arresting works, plenty of which are now on display in “The Art of the Brick,” his global touring exhibition that has hit cities like São Paulo, New York, and Houston.
A graduate of New York University’s law school, a younger Sawaya was able to set aside his artistic propensities (amid “some societal and parental pressures to become a professional”) until a five-year stint at a law firm left him feeling unfulfilled.
“I would come home at night and need some sort of outlet,” Sawaya remembers. “Some people go to the gym, some people hit the bar. For me, I’d get home and need to be creative.” That creativity took different forms—drawing, painting, writing—until a childhood toy unleashed a different side of his imagination. “I started experimenting,” he continues. “Doing representational sculpture: Could I build an apple out of LEGO? A baseball? Could I build that same apple but the size of a basketball with LEGO?”
After setting up his website and receiving hours’ worth of commissioned work, Sawaya left his corporate job to become a full-time LEGO sculptor.
But that was in the mid-2000s, and this is today: Sawaya has recreated Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Myron’s Discobolus statue using only LEGOs. He has built life-size humans made of bricks and has even erected a 20-foot-long Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton, a feat that took three months to complete.
“I did my first solo exhibition [in 2007, at the Lancaster Museum of Art in Pennsylvania] and was amazed at how many kids approached me and said we never come to a museum, and here we are to see your art,” Sawaya says. “I thought I want to give back to these kids and what do kids love? They love dinosaurs.”
Appealing to a younger generation is one of the reasons Sawaya has chosen LEGOs as his medium. Mentioning accessibility to the form, the sculptor explains that a child’s ability to “go home and pick out their own LEGO bricks and start experimenting on their own” excites him. “As an artist, my goal is to inspire,” he says. “It’s about the democratizing of the artwork because it allows so many people to connect to [it].”
In addition to that, there’s an aesthetic draw Sawaya considers. Simply put: He always liked the look of the bricks. “There are these distinct lines, sharp corners, right angles,” Sawaya says. “When you see my work up close you see all the sharp corners, but then you back away and [they] blend into curves. It’s the magic of these LEGOs. It’s all about perspective.”
A walking, breathing tribute to the toy, Sawaya’s deal with LEGO—an expected result of his using the product in a commercial fashion—is a straightforward licensing agreement, which means he purchases his bricks like everyone else, albeit with a bit more access. Given that he uses, on average, between 15,000 and 25,000 pieces per artwork, he likes to keep a stocked inventory, resulting in orders that amount in the hundreds of thousands of bricks each month, which he places with the company directly.
“I want [to have] full selections of colors in all shapes and sizes so that, when I get an idea, I can immediately work on it,” Sawaya says. That stockpile is neatly sorted by shape and color inside clear plastic bins stored in his Los Angeles studio.
In what might be considered an ironic twist of fate, although the renowned bricks are what ultimately catapulted Sawaya away from a corporate job and into a fruitful artistic career, the sculptor is actually bound by the shackles of what LEGO offers. “Unlike a painter, I am beholden to a company when it comes to the palette,” he explains. “A painter can take yellow and blue and make green. I can’t take a yellow brick and a blue and smash them together to get a green brick.”
To that end, Sawaya adds his own restrictions. Although he glues each brick to the one stacked onto it: “We’re shipping all over the world, I want to make sure it arrives in one piece.” And he refuses to modify his medium by cutting or coloring. “I want these bricks to be the exact same that someone can buy in a store,” Sawaya explains. “So, if they see my sculpture and are inspired, they can go to a store and buy the very same brick.”
While perusing “The Art of the Brick” in 2019, one thing becomes instantly clear: Sawaya’s work is some of the most social media friendly art currently out there. Ironically, his ascension to fame in the early aughts does not owe much to the shareability and photographic potential of his creations. But is that still the case? Does Sawaya now choose what to bring into his LEGOland based on what he thinks will be widely shared online? Does he consider how something will look on Instagram before kicking off the building process? “That’s a second thought,” he says. “I want the art to look the way I want it to look in person more than anything.”
As for his competition, when asked about the existence of other LEGO artists (Lego Certified Professionals are recognized by the company as hobbyists who have “turned their passion for building into a full-time or part-time profession”), Sawaya doesn’t miss a beat: “There are 400 million kids out there,” he “They are all LEGO artists!”
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