Leggo My LEGOS

My lovely and talented wife pointed out to me a CNN piece on the VERY cool work of Nathan Sawaya, a former lawyer who gave it all up in 2004 to become a sculptor using only children’s LEGO building blocks. The artist appears above with his sculpture Blue, which appears to be building itself in a dual homage to the blue figures of Yves Klein and the “self-creating” drawings of M.C. Escher.

Sawaya’s touring exhibit The Art of the Brick appears now at the Lancaster Museum of Art in Lancaster, Pennsylvania before moving on to the Discovery Center Museum in Rockville, Illinois. Sawaya, who buys his LEGOS in bulk (obviously), sells his works for up to tens of thousands of U.S. dollars.

Go here to see a gallery of Sawaya's work. His Rebirth of New Orleans (above), on permanent display at the New Orleans Public Library, reinterprets drawings made by children all over America showing how they imagined the rebuilding of New Orleans after the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina.

Sawaya’s Yellow (above) struck me as the most interesting of his works. Because of the square blocks he uses, the curves of his figures have a unique texture. The saturated color of the blocks themselves adds a boldness to the almost expressionist pose of Yellow, who tears open his chest to allow the blocks within to pour out. Sawaya has taken a kid’s medium and brought it to the adult’s table.