Artist built a career out of Legos

Those who saw this year's Oscar telecast may recall the performance of “Everything Is Awesome,” the boisterous nominated theme song from “The Lego Movie.” As Tegan and Sara sang (along with rapping members of the Lonely Island comedy group), a phalanx of cowboy-costumed performers fanned out into the audience, handing out 20 fake Academy Award statuettes - each one made entirely of 500 Lego bricks - to such celebrities as Oprah Winfrey and Steve Carell.

It's not likely that many people would have known the name of the guy who designed and built those faux Oscars. But Nathan Sawaya, who works exclusively in little plastic bricks, commands thousands of dollars for his pieces. The successful contemporary artist also is one of the subjects in “A Lego Brickumentary,” a documentary celebrating the oddball creative community that has grown around Legos.

A former corporate lawyer, the 42-year-old Sawaya quit his day job in 2004 to pursue what was then a hobby. Today, Sawaya divides his time between studios in New York and Los Angeles. Collectors of his work, which includes original sculptures, portrait commissions and reproductions of world masterpieces, all rendered in plastic bricks, include former president Bill Clinton and skateboarder Tony Hawk.

Although the artist was coy when asked in a recent interview about his finances, the Upstart Business Journal reported Sawaya's annual earnings at six figures in 2008. It's hard to imagine that this figure isn't even higher now. According to Sawaya, his yearly budget for art supplies - which he buys by the tens of thousands every month, directly from Lego - is in the six-figure range. “I have a very good business relationship with the Lego group,” he said. “I'm a unique customer.”

Sawaya speaks with similar understatement when recalling the roots of his obsession with the Danish building toy - a system of interlocking bricks, the history of which is charted by “Brickumentary” directors Daniel Junge and Kief Davidson. “Sure, I had Lego as a kid,” Sawaya said, noting that he once built a 36-square-foot Lego city in his living room. “My parents were a bit accommodating in that way.”

They were less accommodating of his request for a pet. As Sawaya remembers it, after his parents refused to buy him a dog, he decided to build himself a life-size canine out of Legos, his first Lego sculpture. “I said to myself, ‘Wait, it doesn't have to be what's on the front of the box.' There are no limits.”

As a lawyer, Sawaya used art to unwind, inspired by the conceptual sculpture of Tom Friedman, whose materials have included sugar cubes and disposable plastic cups. One of Sawaya's early series featured sculptures made entirely of candy.

Sawaya may be the best-known artist in this unorthodox medium. “Just Google ‘Lego art,'” Junge said in an interview, “and Nathan is the first name that comes up. We would have been remiss not to include him.”

But Sawaya is by no means the only artist to work with Legos. The well-known Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei, for instance, created portraits of political prisoners out of Lego bricks for a 2014 exhibition at the former Alcatraz prison. And in 2011 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the collaborative duo of Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro showcased a series of Lego “paintings” based on photographs of the Challenger space shuttle disaster.

You'll find little of that political edge in Sawaya's work, which aims not to disturb but to delight. Now in the midst of a world tour, Sawaya's exhibition “The Art of the Brick” debuted in 2013 to a warm review in the New York Times, which called the playfulness of his forms “contagious.”

Along with a pixelated version of Vermeer's “Girl With a Pearl Earring” and Rodin's “Thinker,” the show featured a massive Tyrannosaurus rex, as well as several sculptures that included loose bricks for audience members to play with. “I'm happy to have people come through the exhibition and put a smile on their faces,” Sawaya says. “I don't think that's a bad thing.”

That ethos of democratic accessibility is central to Junge and Davidson's documentary,which doesn't make sharp distinctions between Sawaya's gallery-caliber art and the creations of others featured in the film: architect Adam Reed Tucker, who builds models of famous buildings out of Legos; Alice Finch, who built a prize-winning model of J.R.R. Tolkien's fictional city of Rivendell for a convention of AFOLs (adult fans of Lego); and former NASA engineer Stephen Pakbaz, whose design for a Mars rover made with Legos was chosen for production by the company as a toy.

All of these things, including Sawaya's works, fall into the category of what the Lego community calls a MOC (my own creation), Junge said.

“There's something profound in the fact that Nathan refers to his Tyrannosaurus rex (made from 80,020 pieces) as a MOC, but so does my daughter, speaking about the six or seven bricks that were being strung together by a 3-year-old at a recent building event we went to,” he said.

That's the same spirit behind “The Lego Movie,” whose message of creativity could be summed up as “think outside the box.” (Both films were made with the cooperation of the Lego company and share an executive producer, Jill Wilfert.

For now, Sawaya has no plans to switch to another art form, comparing the plastic brick's system of interlocking studs and tubes not to paint, clay or any other medium but to what mathematician Soren Eilers calls in the film an “infinitely flexible” shared language. Besides, Sawaya says with characteristic understatement, he's in it too deep at this point to quit.

“I have 4½ million bricks in my studio. I'll probably stick with this a little while longer.”