Some artists use paint, others bronze – But for Nathan Sawaya he chooses to build his awe-inspiring art out of toy building blocks.  LEGO® bricks to be exact. With more than 1.5 million colored bricks in his New York studio, Sawaya’s sculptures take many forms.

Sawaya’s art is currently touring North American museums in a show titled, The Art of the Brick.  It’s the only exhibition focusing exclusively on LEGO as an art medium. The creations, constructed from nearly one million pieces, were built from standard bricks beginning as early as 2002.

For more information: http://www.brickartist.com/

Graffiti has since evolved into a pop culture existence often related to underground hip hop music and b-boying creating a lifestyle that remains hidden from the general public. Graffiti is used as a gang signal to mark territory or to serve as an indicator or “tag” for gang-related activity.

A 2006 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum displayed graffiti as an art form that began in New York’s outer boroughs and reached great heights in the early ’80s with the work of Crash, Lee, Daze, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

It displayed 22 works by New York graffiti artists, including Crash, Daze and Lady Pink. In an article about the exhibition in Time Out Magazine, curator Charlotta Kotik said that she hoped the exhibition would cause viewers to rethink their assumptions about graffiti.

The Bessemer Gallery is named after the nineteenth century British inventor Sir Henry Bessemer who devised a process for the mass production of steel from iron, which revolutionised steel production and created the wealth upon which the City of Sheffield is founded.

For more information: http://www.bessemergallery.com

His first major work, The Charging Chasseur, exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1812, revealed the influence of the style of Rubens and an interest in the depiction of contemporary subject matter. This youthful success, ambitious and monumental, was followed by a change in direction: for the next several years Géricault produced a series of small studies of horses and cavalrymen.

Gericault continually returned to the military themes of his early paintings, and the series of lithographs he undertook on military subjects after his return from Italy are considered some of the earliest masterworks in that medium. Perhaps his most significant, and certainly most ambitious work, is The Raft of the Medusa (1819), which depicted the aftermath of a contemporary French shipwreck, Meduse in which the captain had left the crew and passengers to die. The incident became a national scandal, and Géricault’s dramatic interpretation presented a contemporary tragedy on a monumental scale. The painting’s notoriety stemmed from its indictment of a corrupt establishment, but it also dramatized a more eternal theme, that of man’s struggle with nature. It surely excited the imagination of the young Eugène Delacroix, who posed for one of the dying figures.

After his return to France in 1821, Géricault was inspired to paint a series of ten portraits of the insane, the patients of a friend, Dr. Étienne-Jean Georget, a pioneer in psychiatric medicine, with each subject exhibiting a different affliction. There are five remaining portraits from the series. The paintings are noteworthy for their bravura style, expressive realism, and for their documenting of the psychological discomfort of individuals, made all the more poignant by the history of insanity in Géricault’s family, as well as the artist’s own fragile mental health. His observations of the human subject were not confined to the living, for some remarkable still-lifes—painted studies of severed heads and limbs—have also been ascribed to the artist.

Weakened by riding accidents and chronic tubercular infection, he died in Paris in 1824 after a long period of suffering. His bronze figure reclines, brush in hand, on his tomb at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, above a low-relief panel of The Raft of the Medusa.

Copies of the print are in many Western collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the British Museum in London, and in Claude Monet’s house in Giverny, France.