Nathan Sawaya makes a living playing with Legos.
Sawaya, 42, began his career as a lawyer on Wall Street. But he was constantly dogged by a yearning to do more creative work. Eventually, he happened upon his childhood Lego collection and used it to build massive sculptures, displaying the resulting works on a website.
One day, that website crashed because it got too many hits. That was the turning point. Sawaya walked away from law, turned to Lego, and never looked back.
Since then, Sawaya’s work has traveled the globe in the acclaimed exhibition The Art of the Brick. One of his sculptures was featured in a Lady Gaga music video. His Lego Oscar statue stole the show at the 2015 Academy Awards. He’s penned two best-selling art books and launched a nonprofit. And he’s still creating new works, brick by colorful brick.
“I never in my wildest dreams thought I could keep doing this when I started,” Sawaya told INSIDER. “It was a great experiment that has worked out rather well.”
Sawaya couldn’t get museums to take him seriously when he started as a Lego artist.
“I’d been reaching out to art galleries who were not really getting what I did,” Sawaya said. “At the time, when I brought up the idea of Lego art, people pictured cars and trucks and little castles — things they saw at the toy store. People didn’t see it as an art medium.”
But one museum did get it. In 2007, the executive director at Pennsylvania’s Lancaster Museum of Art reached out to ask Sawaya he was interested in showing a solo exhibition. “When I had that first exhibition, I treated it a lot like my last,” he said. “I figured, well, this is my one shot.”
But that first solo show was a massive success.
The Lancaster Museum of Art normally gets around 35,000 visitors a year, Sawaya said. His exhibition drew 25,000 people in just six weeks. “It was mind-boggling,” he said.
That’s when The Art of the Brick began to take off.
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Sawaya loves the challenge of working with rectangular Lego bricks.
“One of the things that draws me is the look of using rectangular pieces,” Sawaya said. “These very distinct lines, these sharp corners. When you see my sculptures up close, you see those right angles. But then when you back away, all those sharp corners blend into curves.”
The Lego medium also makes the art more accessible, Sawaya explained. “So many different people in the world have played with Lego bricks, so that really democratizes the art,” he said.
Analysis
This article is interesting to me because of the endless creative forms that can be made with something as simple as a lego. Like the artist, it is interesting to me the ways in which rectangular blocks can create curved and smooth forms when arranged together and viewed from a distance. For my senior project, the use of concrete as the primary material at times feels constricting – like I can only make large vertical structures. However, this article proves that even the most simple and bulky of forms can create smooth flowing forms when arranged in a certain way. In fact, arranging the materials in a multitude of directions can increase the overall stability and strength of the structure. I will keep this in mind when developing my senior project further.
Take-Aways
It is possible to achieve complex curves and structure with “blocky” forms – and it is possible with additive manufacturing
Pieces can be stacked or oriented to form an even greater piece
