Record Setting Lego Painting

Imagine you are walking through a hallway. Suddenly, colors of every single shade slam into your retinal cells (poor retinal cells) and even looking at them gives you a headache. Every color you could ever dream of shows up in a huge collection of studs and bricks. The colors swirl around in your head and eventually they form into something amazing. You find yourself looking at an old painting that you’ve seen and did presentations on, but that painting is in New York. This is one of the famous paintings in the collection titled “Water Lilies,”, but it might not be how you know it. 

Water Lilies was a collection of 250 paintings made by Monet from 1840-1926. One of these pieces, “Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond,” has just been taken to the next level. In the Seattle Asian Art Museum, a Chinese artist named Ai Weiwei has made this piece out of legos. These brightly colored bricks that kids love have been made into a beautiful piece of artwork that combines Monet’s colors with the modern style of Ai. As the largest piece of artwork made out of lego right now, this piece takes up an entire wall of the museum, stretching 50 feet wide and using about 650,000 lego bricks. The amount of money needed to buy the amount of legos is massive. It would cost at least tens of thousands of dollars to make the entire thing. This shows the amount of commitment needed to make such a piece. Something funny is that the original painting in the Water Lilies collection was also displayed at the Seattle Art Museum in 1956, so Ai’s piece is a bit like a reincarnation of the old one. 

I think this is an amazing piece displaying many colors and showing how contemporary art can be made into something parents and children can all enjoy. While this isn’t a lego set yet, many people think it should be, and I suspect that the lego company will recognize it soon enough. If you look at the photos, it’s surprising how much this piece looks like the actual Monet painting. The only real difference is that Monet was working with paint and Ai was working with legos, so the colors are a bit too dark and don’t blend quite as well as Monet’s. They are also different shades since the legos have pre-planned colors and they can’t mix together like paint can (although now I know what my next request to lego will be).  Other than that, the Lego version of Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond is nearly identical to the original, straight down to the coral in the bottom right corner. If you want to go see this Lego masterpiece, it will be on display until March 15, 2026. In other words, take a visit to northern Seattle and take a dive into Ai Weiwei’s water lilies.