Vision and emotion are building blocks for ‘Art of the Brick’ at Union Station

Just about everyone loves Legos, except for people who step on them with bare feet.

Those colorful, plastic bricks are a staple of youth and the source of many hours of enjoyment.

But to Nathan Sawaya, they are something much more. In his hands and with his vision, they become the “Mona Lisa” or the iconic bust of Nefertiti or an evocative figure of a man ripping open his chest.

“I tried to put some emotion into this children’s toy, this rectangular brick,” Sawaya said this week as 120 pieces of his art made exclusively with Legos were being installed at Union Station for an exhibit opening Friday. “You’re looking at years and years of my life here.”

“Art of the Brick” is one of the more unusual traveling shows the station has booked, but it is one that has received rave reviews elsewhere. The New York Times said the “playfulness is contagious.”

The pieces vary in size and complexity. A towering figure of a Moai head from Easter Island took two months to create. A T. Rex skeleton took three months and required 80,020 pieces of bone-colored brick.

Each piece has to be mapped out in advance, with sketches. Sawaya uses only standard bricks that anyone can buy. He rarely uses novelty Lego pieces, but an exception is a re-creation of the painting “Girl with a Pearl Earring.” Sawaya used a crystal ball from a Harry Potter Lego kit for the earring.

Where does he get all those Legos?

“I buy it just like everyone else,” Sawaya said. “It’s by far my biggest capital expense. I buy them by the pallet, and I’m not talking about a color palette. I mean wooden pallets of Lego bricks. Every month I probably order hundreds of thousands, if not a million, bricks, and they are shipped to my studio in Los Angeles. I have developed a very good business relationship with the Lego Group in Denmark.”

How did he come to this avocation?

Sawaya was a corporate lawyer in New York who was searching for a way to express his creativity after work. He tried drawing, painting and sculpting with clay. Then he began to think of those simple bricks as a possible art medium.

“What about this toy from my childhood?” he asked himself. “Can I create large sculptures with Lego? I just started experimenting.”

Sawaya was in his early 30s when he quit the law firm about a dozen years ago. Some of his colleagues reacted negatively. He had a secure lifestyle, they said.

“Why was I going to leave all that behind to go play with toys?”

Sawaya knew it might be a mistake, but he was determined to try.

“I knew I had found something that I wanted to do that made me happy,” he said. “That’s why I had to make that transition. I was not happy as a lawyer, and I had to make a change.”

That experience informs a piece called “Grasp,” which depicts a human figure in red bricks trying to break free of gray arms holding him back.

Sawaya’s first solo exhibit was in 2007 at the Lancaster Museum of Art in Pennsylvania. He expected it to be his last, but he was gratified by the positive reaction from children and adults. Sawaya also sells his work in galleries now. Elton John bought one.

Today there are six versions of the traveling exhibit. The one visiting Kansas City is the largest. It includes a new work inspired by Kansas City that took Sawaya a month to create. It will remain here when the exhibit closes on Memorial Day.

There are no barriers between the visitor and the art, but that has not proved to be a problem at other stops.

“There is a desire to touch, right?” Sawaya said. “This is a tactile toy that people are familiar with. But we ask people to respect the art and not touch it. At the end of the exhibition there’s a hands-on area for when people really need to grab those bricks. We encourage them to explore their own imagination.”

Sawaya sees his work as a bridge.

“If you come in here loving art, you leave loving Lego,” he said. “If you come in loving Lego, you leaving loving art.”

This story was originally published January 25, 2018 at 3:27 PM.