Calgarian Calvin Dueck is a hair stylist by day, but an artist by night – and one of his favourite mediums to use is Lego.
Dueck says he can spend months working on a single art piece, sometimes using more than 10,000 pieces of the colourful plastic for a single project.
He began creating with Lego 20 years ago, saying it was something he could do to keep his hands busy while watching television.
“I sort of told myself that if I’m going to be (watching TV), then I have to be doing something productive at the same time,” Dueck said.
“I scoured through my closets and dug up a whole bucket of Lego and started.”
Dueck says there’s a lot of trial and error when he’s making his art, but the great thing about Lego is that it can be dismantled easily, and he can start over.
“I’m not married to the ending,” he said. “I can’t be, because inevitably there will be an obstacle that I run into and you have to change it, which I kind of like, but that’s usually where the creativity comes in and you just figure out a way around it.”
Dueck says he has a lot of ‘play sessions’ where his hands just start placing pieces, building abstract structures.
“If I’m needing to be inspired, I just start playing with Lego and I figure something out,” he said.
“I have to sit down with the pile of Lego and just goof around and not have any kind of consequences, and usually stuff comes up that way. I get a structural idea and then play around with that.”
Dueck says his largest piece is in the board room at SIA Wealth Management Inc. on Sixth Avenue S.W. in Bow Valley Square
Dahlia MacRea, an employee at SIA Wealth Management, says she heard about Dueck through a friend.
“It really lends to what we do here in terms of innovation, creativity and also is a real nod to technology in a way,” she said.
“Everybody who comes in goes up to it and says, ‘Is this Lego? What is this? Who made it? It’s incredibly cool,’ and I couldn’t agree more.”
Maya Gohill, a friend and artist, says she enjoys seeing what Dueck comes up with.
“They’re not just esthetic pieces, they’re these marvels of math and algorithmic logic in a way,” she said.
“I think that they’re brilliant, his work is a fusion between mathematical rigor and visual art, and I think that they’re fascinating pieces.”
Gohill says not only is Dueck’s art great, but his hair styling is good too.
“I have naturally curly hair, and he treats my hair like a sculpture,” she said. “There’s moments where I see him kind of moving around and he’s looking at it, it’s literally like he’s kind of sculpting my hair.”
Dueck spends thousand of dollars to keep his supply of Lego up and jokes that he’s attracted to endlessly tedious things.
“The last piece that I did, I worked on from April to Christmas, every day or every other day for at least a few hours,” he said.
“There’s something that’s precise about Lego that I really kind of think is neat, and it’s you can literally build something, and if you do it without breaking too many rules, it’s solid.”
Dueck says if one of his Lego pieces isn’t selling or he gets tired of it, he just disassembles it and starts a new project.
He says Lego is too expensive to just let it sit and collect dust.
His pieces range in price from $500 to $5,500.
