Early this week, the Daily Mail in the UK ran a story about Herb Williams who is from Alabama and lives in Nashville now — the article reads in part:
Meet the artist who was inspired by a dream to start making these spectacular 3D sculptures out of hundreds and thousands of Crayola crayons.
—Each sculpture then takes him a staggering four to six months to create and can sell for thousands of dollars – with a nude Marilyn Monroe portrait and a fully-clothed Barack Obama piece selling for a combined sum of $50,000.
—The Alabama-born artist, who is the only person in the world to have a personal account with Crayola due to the amount of crayons he buys from them, said: ‘My art career wasn’t really taking off and I was starving, beating my head against the wall, and alienating my friends.
‘It got to the point where I thought ‘this is not worth it’.
‘So I gave up on art and even burned a few of my works. But that night I had the most powerful dream and was inspired by someone in my dream to start using crayons as an artistic medium.
‘The next morning, as soon as I woke up, I jotted down some ideas in a notebook by the side of my bed – and I’ve been making a living from them ever since.
—Herb’s work has caused such a splash in the art world he has even been commissioned to create personal pieces for President Obama.
He said: ‘The White House now want to commission me to make 3D crayon sculptures which will be used as gifts for them to give to delegates on foreign trips, like kings, queens and important political figures.
‘Each one will be custom made for the delegate depending on which country they are from.
‘It’s such an enormous honour – I’m very humbled.’
Image used courtesy Talk Radio News under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic. Thank you!
Herb Williams’ website is here; his works can be purchased online here. NPR’s story on him here.