One man's quest to prove Legos can be art

 

Three years ago, graphic designer Mike Doyle took his kids to Legoland as part of one those parental rights of passage. But a funny thing happened when he got there.

 

Doyle was in a room at the amusement park in Carlsbad where people can build Lego cars to race on a wooden track. As he pieced together his own creation, he found himself suddenly swept up in the moment.

 

"It’s the first time I really free-form played with it on my own since I was a kid," he said. "I played Legos with the kids at home, but it’s not the same. I got really excited by it."

Excited? More like obsessed.

 

Doyle returned home to Brooklyn in the grips of Lego fever that would soon see him transformed into one of the word's most acclaimed Lego builders.

 

That fascination also connected him to a worldwide community of adults who use Lego bricks to create fantastic sculptures. To demonstrate the power of this work and to try to give these artists their due, Doyle has just published a new book called: "Beautiful Lego."

 

The 280-page book contains a combination of photographs that he took along with ones submitted by other artists from around the world. The book also features interviews and essays from some of the artists who explain their vision and fascination with something commonly viewed as a child's toy.

These people share the same kind of passion and vision that Doyle discoverd upon returning home from that trip when he couldn't stop thinking about how building something so basic as a car was so satisfying.

 

"That got me super excited," he said. "Began thinking about what I could do. Came up with this abandoned house series. I wanted to do large scale so I could photograph them." (See slideshow above)

 

In part, he loved the challenge of taking what feels like a fairly limited medium -- rectangular plastic bricks -- and arranging them in a way that creates the illusion of something softer or curved.

 

"It sort of tricks the mind," he said. "Everyone has probably played with Lego. Everyone is accustomed to the limitations it presents.

 

"I had a fascination with turning the hard Legos into something that appears organic," he said. "I sought out situations that were more organic, like snow."

 

His creations were on a massive scale. The book's cover features of one his creations: ""The Millenial Celebration of the Eternal Choir at K'al Yne." It used more than 200,000 bricks.

 

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