NoGoodz

Yellow by Nathan Sawaya www.brickartist.com

Nathan Sawaya is living the dream that all creative kids who have grown up wish they could be doing now: playing with LEGOs every day. But he’s not fooling around, oh no, he’s playing with color, form, aesthetics, contrast and contour as he painstakingly creates one-of-a-kind jumbo-sized works of art out of thousands of mono-chromatic, standard LEGO bricks and rendering in an almost Pop Art sort of way the most mundane, the most conceptual, and the most bizarre.

Born in Washington state and raised in Oregon, this New York-based artist/sculptor received his first set of LEGOs at the age of 5. But that was not his initial impetus towards success. He, like so many other artists, had to go through the corporate world first - in his case, the world of law.  But somewhere around the millennium, the late nights of sculpting in various materials brought him to a box of LEGOs and that, as they say, was that. From then on Sawaya dabbled and constructed until he realized those little plastic pieces from Denmark were the perfect vehicle for his creativity. After winning LEGO’s Master Model Builder competition in 2004 and now with over a million tiny color bricks littering his studio (perfectly sorted by color and shape of course), Sawaya is a highly-sought after artist by the likes of Donald Trump, Pete Wentz, and Ashlee Simpson and is appearing in galleries, newspapers, and television shows all over the country.

Mask by Nathan Sawaya www.brickartist.com

Between 2000 to 2007, Sawaya has been planning and constructing the most amazing life-sized and over-life-sized sculptural pieces purely out of LEGOs. Like an homage to both Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg, some of his works are gigantic three-dimensional pixelated reproductions of popular objects like a pencil (his first work), the Brooklyn Bridge, a bumble bee, chess pieces, and many others. But the most impressive and awe-inspiring works are his own creative explorations in capturing abstract/abject moments in an almost “Beyond the Mind’s Eye” sort of reality. From the moment of cellular destabilization of a body to the revealing of a mask that was once a face to the restraining of a form by a wall of disembodied hands, you feel as if those early computer-generated videos from Miramar had an intense effect on the psyche of Sawaya. Transferring one variation of a pixel to another is definitely an underlying tone of his almost obsessive, yet very playful translations.

Gray by Nathan Sawaya www.brickartist.com

These days Sawaya is touring the country’s museums and media circuit in his show entitled “The Art of the Brick”. Detailing his achievement in transforming the popular children’s learning toy into a viable art medium, his frozen-in-time pieces, plasticized portraits, and multi-faceted re-representations are traveling throughout the year to galleries in Philadelphia, PA; Hollywood, FL; Rockford, IL; Edmonton, Alberta; Kansas City, MO; and Corpus Christi, TX. Nightly he and his works are appearing on television staples like The Late Show with David Letterman and The Colbert Report (where he presented Stephen with his own life-sized portrait).

From custom projects to collaborations to commissions, Nathan Sawaya is an inspiration to all kids—young and old—that the play which filled your hours with joy can turn into a lifestyle and a career that is always fun, creative, and expressive. See more of Nathan Sawaya’s work at this site, www.brickartist.com