The Art of the Brick

106

the fear

of fear

hands

I’m a worrier. Whatever success I’ve had, I’m always

thinking, can I sustain this? When’s the other shoe

going to drop? What if my work is just a fad, a kind of

artistic pet rock that people find bright and shiny for a

while before moving on to something else?

Hands came after my Lancaster, Pennsylvania, show,

sometime in 2008. I’d never expected to have a solo

show, and when Lancaster came up, I took it with both

hands (so to speak!). I never really thought it would

be successful; I was just this guy noodling around with

LEGO bricks.

But Lancaster did go well, lots of people came, and

suddenly art people—serious art people—became

interested in what I was doing. I got invited to do

another solo show, in Hollywood, Florida. And, of

course, they said, “We want to see some new stuff,

work that no one else has seen before.”

Worry is a misuse of the imagination.

—Dan Zadra

107

So I went back into the studio, but I found that

something had changed. There were expectations

that never existed before. In my studio, alone,

surrounded by all these buckets of bricks with a

blank table in front of me, I suddenly found myself

very afraid.

What if I can’t think of anything to create?

What if the thing I create sucks?

What if I create this show for Florida, and nobody

comes, and the reviews are bad, and the gallery

loses a ton of money?

What if Lancaster was just a fluke, and really there is

no talent in these hands after all?

In 2008, it wasn’t too late for me to go back to being

a lawyer. I still had my law degree, I was a member

of the bar—I had the pieces of paper that told the

world, “This guy’s a lawyer.” I didn’t have a piece of

paper that said, “Yes, you are an artist. Yes, you have

the world’s permission to do what you do.”

108

109

110

It was just me and a room full of bricks, waiting

for an idea to turn up.

So I decided to use the fear. Rather than let it

suffocate my ideas, I let it be the idea. I created

Hands, a depiction of an artist’s worst nightmare.

I was afraid that I’d reached the limit of my

ability, that I’d peaked and that people would

no longer have an interest in what I was doing.

Happily, I was wrong. When I turned 30 years

old, I thought there was no way that I’d be

doing this at 35.