Marc Sijan - hyperrealist contemporary sculptor

Welcome to The Arts Page, I'm Sandy Maxx. We are at the Wisconsin Center in downtown Milwaukee. The Wisconsin Center is more than a convention facility. It is home to the $1.2 million John J. Burke family collection of public art. It was commissioned and integrated as part of this building's architecture. You may also recognize the family name from the Burke Brise Soleil, the wings of the Calatrava edition of the Milwaukee Art Museum. Many art pieces are made with the love of an artist's hands. Look at this hyper-realistic sculpture, Security Guard, created by Milwaukee-based artist Mark Sajan. His life-size sculptures are so realistic that people are often fooled, or at least have to do a double-take. The most important thing to Mark is not just the incredible detail in his work, but also capturing a moment of human emotion that brings his sculptures to life. I think some of the greatest artwork is that which challenges, and I want somebody to carry away this image with them long after they've seen it. They don't wanna see something they've already seen before. They want to see something new and fresh. My name is Mark Sajan. I'm an artist, and my specialty is hyper-realism. I deal with life-size figurative sculptures. Realism, or hyper-realism, there was detail that you may not expect, almost photographic, that was brought into sculptures. It's true to life right down to the details, in my case, of fingerprints and footprints. I went to undergraduate work, and I was gonna be a teacher, and they asked me, what would you like to teach? And I said, how about English? And so I started taking the classes. I also had to take an art class, a basic art course. And I took it, and I loved it. And I said, geez, I could do this. I could teach this. I'll teach art. I hadn't any other formal education in high school or anything in the way of art, but I just really enjoyed it. I really loved it. So that was the start. Always liked the figure, the human anatomy. Always liked the idea of hyper-realism, or the perfection of the sculpture, not only at the skin level, but also internally. It was the emotion and the internalized spirit that became the real focus in the last number of years. Well, the posings are the concepts of the most important part of the entire sculpture. The concept of what they're saying, and I try to make them thought-provoking, something with a soul, something with a story, a message. The concept is where it starts. It's where, actually, most of my time is spent, is trying to come up with a concept, trying to come up with a pose. And then I select the model, and I try to find the model that would be most fitting, whether it be younger or older, a certain size, a certain quality of their face. I try to find that person, neighbor, friend, relatives. I stop people in the street sometimes and ask them if they'd like to be part of what I'm doing. I really wanted to do more of the common man. Very often, people that, maybe others don't even notice, the ordinary man, the fellow in the street that you might just pass by. And I also like a lot of character. I like faces that have a certain look, a certain quality to them that maybe relates to the theme or the story that I'm trying to tell within the sculpture. Then, as far as clothes, I would then, again, follow the theme, wherever the theme happens to be. I'd ask them, very often, to bring their own clothes in. That may work, or I'd go to the thrift shops and find different clothes that they could wear. And all those decisions, the prosthetic eyes, the hair, and everything else, is then determined. I do life casting, directly from the human anatomy. And at that one second, that one moment, they have to capture the mood of what I'm trying to have them to do. If it's feeling good or feeling bad or smiling, they have to be able to try to hold that or capture that. So that emotion is very, very important within the face and within the body language. It's one of the most important things I have to do and try to get my model to do or try to correct it, maybe later on, if I possibly can. Polyester resin, or resin, is the base material. And then I finished off with artist oil paints. There's approximately 15 coats of paint that are layered on, one on top of the other, to give it a skin-like translucency with the paint. So you have resin, you have artist oil paints, and then the mixed media being all the other props or clothes or hair, prosthetic eyes that are used on the sculptures. I'm always looking for a model. I'm always looking for a subject, something out of the ordinary that's not normal. It often will be the person themselves or maybe what they're doing. They all have a story. The viewer needs to figure out what the story is. Sometimes I tell people, often I don't, to allow the viewer to kind of fill in the blanks and try to have their interpretation of what they see. Life's experiences are often painted on the faces of these sculptures. And you try to determine from what walk of life did they come from, what their occupation is, what they're thinking, what their whole family environmental situation is like. And so you get to kind of think about all these things. Most people haven't seen themselves in a three-dimensional format. We all have photographs, two-dimensional renderings. And to see a three-dimensional rendering, they don't even know what to say. They look around, they say, oh, you got all the detail? You even got that one little mole? So they're always fascinated. Well, there is some confusion about, is it a real person? And that's not my main thing, is to try to fool people, but that is what happens. And I spend a lot of attention, a lot of time on the finer detail. So there isn't any of those signs. But they react to them in trying to figure out, again, what this person is trying to do or trying to say or what the story is. The evolution of a piece takes, it takes years. It really does. Very often, maybe the core of the piece is done in, say, six months. But then there's always something I'm looking at. I always look at a piece, I say, I could improve that, that could get better, I could change that. And I'm always poking, I'm always analyzing pieces as I go. I think a lot of people look at these pieces at the surface level, at the technique. But it's really the internal emotion that is significant about these pieces. You really need to look inside yourself. You really need, it just needs to be part of you, something you enjoy, something that you like, something that is about you. And the best pieces are when they're about you and when they're truthful. And only honesty and truth within what you're displaying are gonna be the purest piece and they're gonna be the best piece. Mark Saizhan is ranked number one in the world for his hyper-realistic life-size sculptures and was a finalist for this year's coveted art prize in Grand Rapids, Michigan. You can see the sculpture of his dad here in the lobby at the Wisconsin Center and other works of his in art museums around the world.