Growing up in Veneta, Ore., Nathan Sawaya constructed a 36-square-foot city behind his parents’ living room couch.
The primary-colored metropolis, painstakingly pieced together one durable plastic brick at a time, thrived for more than a decade. There were schools, restaurants, an airport and hotel — even an amusement park. But Sawaya wasn’t prepping for a future in Lilliputian design. He was laying the foundation for a career in Lego art.
In 2004, Sawaya left his job as a corporate lawyer to play with Legos professionally. “One day my site got so many hits that it crashed,” he says. “That’s when I realized I had a viable business.”
More than 1. 5 million Lego bricks are stashed in clear bins and shelved according to color — like “walking into a rainbow” — at Sawaya’s New York City art studio, where the 35-year-old spends much of his time brainstorming and building.
Though he doesn’t keep count, he estimates his
average-sized sculptures (Sawaya’s creations range
in size from a two-brick tree to a 20-foot-long T. rex
skeleton) use anywhere from 20,000 to 80,000 Lego bricks.
Sawaya’s first “sale,” a self-designed Barbie-sized Lego car bartered for Halloween candy, paved the way for dozens more Lego sculptures, logos, and portraits, including a life-sized replica of satirist Stephen Colbert, an anatomically correct human heart, a 7-foot-long Brooklyn Bridge, and what is likely his most popular piece, a male figure tearing his chest open with Lego bricks spilling out, aptly named Yellow.
“I have received thousands of emails about this piece over the years,” he says.
According to Sawaya, there’s definitely one advantage to using Lego as a medium: “If I don’t like how something looks after I built it, I can just take it apart and build it again differently.”
—Laura Kiniry
>> Sawaya’s studio: brickartist.com
Photograph by brickartist.com
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