"If Claude Monet Had Grown Up With Lite-Brite"
Otherwise known as "Giant Lite-Brite".
5x7 feet including copper frame. 62,586 Lite-Brite pegs.
Now on exhibit at the Guinness Record Museum in Hollywood,California.
"Giant Lite-Brite" was originally created for the RedShift Gallery of Denver in collaboration with the Denver Art Museum's 1999 European Impressionism show. The show featured many Impressionist painters collected by museums across Europe and was the largest showing of its kind in the Rocky Mountain region. |
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"Giant Lite-Brite" was inspired by the 1970's Milton-Bradley toy (as seen below). It's function was to demonstrate how children view the world, larger than life. The piece itself is an exact replica of the toy in design but not in size. "Giant Lite-Brite" is 20 times the actual size of the toy and has 62,856 actual Lite-Brite pegs. This piece appeals to the young and old, stretching the imagination beyond limits and recapturing youthful moments of a child in a dark corner playing with Lite-Brite. At the same time it demonstrates the free representational brush stroke that the Impressionists used to emulate the natural light of the outdoors. This later developed into the "Pointillistic" technique which eventually spawned new theories in color optics from television tubes to computer printers. "Giant Lite-Brite" replaces the natural light of the painters brush with artificially colored plastic pegs. I still tried to maintain a "natural" color scheme as much as I could using the seven original colors that the Lite-Brite toy came with.
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Original Lite-Brite Toy by Milton Bradley. Front face of toy is 9" x 12". |
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Actual size of pegs. |
I chose the image "Impression Sunrise" by Claude Monet to demonstrate how he could have used this fantastic light toy to "illuminate" his outdoor visions in today's society.
Click for detail of "Giant Lite-Brite"
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Monet's Impression Sunrise
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| Although this piece was originally designed and created for the Impressionism show in 1999, information from the museum leaked and before I knew it Guinness World Records called. | 
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"Giant Lite-Brite" was officially recognized as a new Guinness World Record in 2000 for being the biggest Lite-Brite image. It is printed in the 2001 Guinness Record edition under Toys and is currently on display at the Guinness World Record Museum in Hollywood, California.
