It's not child's play. A US artist is selling sculptures made of Lego for up to $20,000 USD each.
Nathan Sawaya's works use as many as 150,000 of the brightly coloured bricks and are in demand by top art dealers in the States.
Mr Sawaya, who quit his job as a New York corporate lawyer in 2001 to build a new life for himself as an artist, now shows his creations in galleries around the world.
The 34-year-old even has his own touring exhibition, The Art of the Brick, which uses over 1,500,000 coloured bricks to create 30 works of art.
Key pieces in the show are his Red, Yellow, and Blue series which Nathan says explore the human emotions attached to birth, death and transformation.
He was recently offered $21,000 USD for a single piece, he says.
The artist spends his days playing with the toy bricks in his New York studio where he keeps over 1.5 million spare blocks.
He said recently: "Most of the time, I spend between eight to 12 hours each day creating with Lego, but it depends on what I'm working on.
"Sometimes when I get really into a sculpture, I can spend 18 hours at a time.
"I spend a lot of time sketching out my ideas on special graph paper that has the brick shapes printed on it. Then the rest of the day is spent building."
When he has finished assembling the artworks, he rebuilds them using glue to keep the bricks together.
He added: "At night, after a long day at the law firm, I would create.
"That was where I would escape.
"Lego is my signature medium.
"I really believe there is nothing I can't build out of Lego, so I can express anything.
"There are no limits to what I can create."
Lego is now half a century old. Danish carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen came up with the plastic brick design in 1958. Its name comes from the Danish "leg godt", which means "good play ". Today, Lego is sold in 130 countries and played with by more than 400 million children - and adults. Two million bricks are produced every hour and ther
By Owen Williams, Jan 28 2008 © Copyright 2008 - Showbiz Spy
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