We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Rocco Buttliere a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Rocco, appreciate you joining us today. Have you been able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen? Was it like that from day one? If not, what were some of the major steps and milestones and do you think you could have sped up the process somehow knowing what you know now?
I have been making a living as a LEGO Artist since finishing my architecture studies at IIT in Chicago in 2017. I would say that the thing which distinguishes my trajectory from others who have taken similar paths is that I had managed to carve out a niche for myself well before I ever decided to pursue my creative work full time. You see, it was back in 2009 when I first combined my emerging love of architecture and my lifelong love of LEGO. The results since have been an ever-growing body of work consisting of 1:650 scale pieces depicting various world landmarks and landscapes.
Starting out when I was a freshman in high school, the idea was very much in line with my approach to other creative interests at the time; which included painting and other forms of model-making. It was all about trying various subject matter to test my limits in depicting various styles. From the outset, though, I was careful to always maintain that 1:650 scale among all my works. From my hometown Willis Tower, to iconic structures such as Empire State Building and Burj Khalifa, several well-known skyscrapers were tackled by the end of 2009. The subject matter continued to venture in the supertall direction for another year and a half until, in 2011, I felt confident enough in my then-eleven works to exhibit them publicly for the first time at Brickworld Chicago, a yearly convention near the Chicago suburb where I grew up. At the age of fourteen, I certainly wouldn’t have settled on a word like “curation” for the way in which my works were able to stand beside each other on a set of tables: but with the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear that the uniformity of scale and the common medium of LEGO were the connective tissues holding the geographically and architecturally distinct pieces into the makings of a body of work.
Fast forward to 2015, I had just finished my third year of architecture studies at IIT when I was approached at Brickworld Chicago by two different event organizers. One invited me to their show in London later that year, while the other invited me to exhibit at the newly-established BrickUniverse events in the States. The logistics of exhibiting at the former involved a successful 30-day Kickstarter campaign to raise $5,500 to cover air freight expenses, while the latter would lead to five additional events in 2016, and up to twelve in years soon after. As it turns out, it was the experience of making both work that led me to making the necessary investments in packing my work to allow for more streamlined logistics in taking on a greater number of yearly events.
By the time I graduated IIT in 2017, I began to realize the potential for taking on my creative pursuits full-time in lieu of a traditional career in the architecture field. This could not have been possible without those those two lightning-in-a-bottle moments in 2015 when organizers from different events saw my then-forty works and realized I could fill a larger-than-average gallery space at their events. More importantly, it was the moment I realized that something which began as mere creative expression had become something of its own; something which others would pay to see and perhaps pay to own in their home or office. It was since then that I began a one-man small business focused on exhibitions & commissions.
Rocco, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
My path toward finding a niche of my own had largely been found. But what forms would future work take if the body of work were to remain challenging, rewarding and worth seeing in person? This is where I credit the decision to keep my LEGO bricks on-hand during my college years as the pivotal decision in my growth toward a full-time artist.
Without the medium of my artistic expression readily available, I might not have acted on the creativity sparked by the course material with which I was so taken. Being so immersed in architectural subject matter and settings in Chicago, I found myself designing at a rate which, quite frankly, surprised me. I still managed to score A’s and B’s in all my courses, while ensuring to carve out the time needed to design the next LEGO landmark. These early years of academia culminated between 2014 and 2015 when I began to combine the numerous Chicago landmarks in a geographically accurate landscape covering broad swaths of the city.
My 2015 depiction of the North Loop area of Chicago was the crucial turning point I didn’t know I had been building to the entire time. The self-contained idea of “Landmark” was suddenly expanded to a much more cohesive expression of “Landscape.” And while the form of my work has varied widely in subject matter over the years, it has remained remained consistent in curation from the uniform 1:650 scale and the continued exploration of world landmarks and landscapes of varying historical precedence.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
To this day, one of the most rewarding parts of being a self-employed artist is taking part in a traveling exhibition (BrickUniverse) which provides a platform for me to share my work with people in regions which are often most overlooked by the larger convention-type shows. Being one of a handful of featured artists allows me to curate my own space and selection of work at each and every venue. Spending time doing weekend meet-and-greets with the general public at each and every event is such an invaluable way to gauge feedback and ascertain which works are exciting the public most, as well as which of the more obscure work they are most surprised to learn about, More importantly, I remember how formative it was to my own creativity to see what others were building with LEGO bricks. At the end of the day, I can only hope to return a fraction of that over the course of a single weekend exhibition.
Initially in pursuing my art professionally, the idea that others would commission me for bespoke work was also one of the most rewarding aspects of my work. Since 2019, I have created and installed numerous large landscape dioramas for the Museu da Imaginação in São Paulo. These have included bespoke works depicting Ancient Rome, Forbidden City and First Century Jerusalem, as well as smaller replicas of existing pieces from my body of work. It certainly is quite an honor to have work featured in a family-oriented museum on another continent!
I would, however, being doing a disservice if I didn’t say that the double-edged sword of carving out your own niche is that large commission projects tend to be drops in the bucket. That is to say, you can hope for the best, but ultimately, your income has to be buttressed by longer-term revenue streams. That is why since 2021, I have been reorienting the bulk of my efforts toward self-reliance in the form of Patreon subscriptions and more affordable offerings of my work. The reality is, the average working class family is who I most enjoy providing outreach to at the BrickUniverse events. Why then, should my business model be exclusively based in exhibitions and commissions, when bespoke art is not comparable to the average off-the-shelf retail prices the average creatives can bear? That is why I have been striving lately to expand my offerings toward subscriptions, custom buildable kits and (soon-to-be-available) coffee-table books. It’s no exaggeration to say that these may, in the end, have much wider reach potential than a large, one-off diorama at a museum 5,000 miles away.
Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?
One anecdote which immediately comes to mind is from Elton John’s recent autobiography, ME. In one passage, he recalls a time he met Michael Jackson at dinner. He recalled Jackson seeming rather dejected and unable to continue a conversation for any meaningful amount of time. The impression here for Elton John was that Jackson had spent half his life trying to outdo himself by surpassing previous successes.
This struck a chord with me as one of the comments I field most frequently on social media after posting a new piece is “You’ve outdone yourself!” While all art is cumulative and based in precedent, setting out to “outdo” one’s self is such a specious endeavor as it never allows you to properly learn from the experience that crafting each new piece has to offer. Instead, you’ll be left comparing the rollout of each new work to previous highs, rather than ensuring you are properly avoiding such self-referential tendencies throughout the design. Anyone comparing the design of the Austin J. Tobin Plaza in my Former World Trade Center piece to my design for Piazza San Pietro in Vatican City, for instance, can see the clear throughline in technique between these pieces which were designed years apart. But the fact of the matter is the latter was not merely replication, but a synthesis of techniques discovered earlier, carefully balanced with others I had crafted since then, with several novel nuances to reflect the individuality of the piazza.
Separately, I should also point out that – much like the academic setting informing my earlier Chicago-based works – the subject matter of my bespoke commissions has shaped my personal inspiration as well. The first large landscape diorama for the Museu da Imaginação was, in fact, Imperial Rome, circa mid-4th century CE. Since then, my reading and media consumption has taken a headfirst dive into the infinitely vast rabbit hole that is classical antiquity! So much so, that I have structured the aforementioned subscription-based offerings around the design + build effort to reconstruct the entirety of the Eternal City over the course of several years. Such an undertaking allows fans of my work to support it directly. while receiving exclusive insights and giveaways along the way. All the while, the realization of a display piece which may well eclipse one million bricks will address a conspicuously absent feature of my current body of work; a large exhibition centerpiece. Efforts in this direction will also hopefully lead to longer term exhibition opportunities at venues such as museums: though I do hope to always be involved with community-oriented exhibitions like BrickUniverse indefinitely.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.roccobuttliere.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rjbuttliere/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rjbuttliere/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rocco-buttliere-854267114/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkf-yy4q2fH1PAc_cuBH7Fg
- Other: patreon.com/RoccoButtliere
Image Credits
© MMXXII – Rocco Buttliere, LLC