Buzz
While many artists believe they need collaboration to produce their masterpieces, the individuals featured here thrived without such partnerships. In fact, some of them found that working alone was essential, whether for practical reasons or personal philosophies. Despite varying in style, success, and popularity, what unites them is their unparalleled dedication and passion for their craft.
10. Rock Garden of Chandigarh
In 1958, road inspector Nek Chand from Chandigarh, India, began a quiet yet remarkable project that would evolve over eighteen years. Using discarded materials like masonry and refuse he found in a local dump, he transformed what started as a small heap of waste into a sprawling twelve-acre rock garden, complete with sculptures, walkways, and walls that now captivate visitors.
The act was entirely illegal, taking place within a public nature reserve, but it was so remarkable that after its discovery in 1976, people risked their own safety, using their bodies as human shields to stop bulldozers and other machinery from destroying it. The park remains intact to this day, having been embraced by India as a national treasure, drawing around 5,000 visitors daily.
9. Sita Sings the Blues
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Nina Paley, an animator based in New York, was navigating a painful divorce when she encountered the Ramayana, a Hindu epic. The troubled relationship between the gods Ramaya and Sita deeply resonated with Paley, and she devoted five years to creating her own eighty-two-minute animated epic—all of it produced from the comfort of her home computer.
Despite facing numerous copyright issues with the music and significant backlash from both left- and right-wing factions of the Hindu community, the film still achieved global distribution and received positive reviews, including praise from notable critics like Roger Ebert.
In response to the copyright issues, Paley made the film available for free viewing online.
8. Dust: An Elysian Tale
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Dean Dodrill spent three and a half years crafting this stunning 2D RPG platformer. The game received mostly positive feedback and sold tens of thousands of copies within its first year, priced at $15 each.
Some players criticized the use of anthropomorphic animals as characters, feeling it aligned the game with a niche group known as 'furries,' or they found the second lead, Fidget, to be irritating. However, few could argue against the impressive animation and combat mechanics, especially considering it was all the work of a single developer.
7. Aba Defar’s Churches
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Aba Defar, claiming divine inspiration from thirty years of dreams starting in 1959, has built four churches in Ethiopia. However, instead of constructing them in the usual way, he carved them directly into the rock using pickaxes. These churches, measuring about sixteen by thirty-two feet (5m by 10m) and featuring four pillars, are stark in their design. Though humble in appearance, they are likely to endure far longer than many more elaborately constructed churches.
6. Salvation Mountain
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Turning to another notable religious artwork, Leonard Knight’s monumental painting in Niland, California, stands as a testament to his vision. Three stories high and a hundred feet (30m) wide, the artwork began in 1985. After the first attempt collapsed within four years, Knight pressed on, eventually using 100,000 gallons of paint to stabilize it. Despite protests over the use of public land for religious expression, the structure has endured. In recent years, Knight’s declining health has led to a public effort to preserve the murals and sayings of Salvation Mountain.
5. Romeo and Juliet: Sealed with a Kiss
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While Nina Paley’s feature-length Sita Sings the Blues employed some clever, cost-cutting flash animation for her narrative, Phil Nibbelink, a former Disney animator, opted for traditional cel animation to bring his version of Shakespeare’s iconic tragedy to life.
With 112,000 frames hand-drawn on his home computer, the film evokes the style of a lesser Don Bluth production—criticized by reviewers but met with lukewarm responses from audiences. However, given that it was a solo endeavor from a period dominated by films like Doogal and Delgo, its $463,000 gross seems like a relative success.
4. Toothpick San Francisco
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As Scott Weaver explains in the video above, his toothpick sculpture, which he dedicated thirty-five years to creating, may not hold the title of the world’s largest, but it certainly stands out by allowing a ball to roll through it. With a collection of 100,000 toothpicks from around the globe, Weaver plans to showcase his work in San Francisco in April 2013.
3. Watts Towers
The subject of a 2011 documentary, Simon Rodia’s seventeen towers—which took thirty-three years to build—might merely seem to be dangerous pieces of junk. In fact, Rodia did build them partly from junk, like Nek Chand did his rock garden.
The towers were for a time marked by the city of Los Angeles for demolition; they were considered unsafe, especially since the tallest of them reaches one hundred feet (30m). But stress tests were performed, and these revealed that the towers were more than strong enough to be allowed to remain standing—and so they were. In 2011, the New York Times reported that there had been trouble raising the support needed to maintain the towers, tourism and public support being limited both by their eccentric nature and by the fact that they’re in the L.A. equivalent of an obscure area.
2. Throne of the Third Heaven
This collection, created by James Hampton, was inspired by dreams much like the churches in Ethiopia. Hampton, a janitor by day, devoted his off-hours to crafting this secret homage to God over the span of fourteen years. After his death, the vast art collection was deemed significant enough to be displayed at the Smithsonian.
1. Blood Tea and Red String
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Stop-motion, a time-consuming and somewhat outdated technique, was the method of choice for director Christine Cegavske, who spent thirteen years making this 2005 film. The story, told without dialogue, revolves around a group of crow-rat hybrids whose doll is stolen by malevolent white mice.
The film is just as strange and subtly unsettling as one might expect. However, it garnered praise from prestigious publications like the New York Times and Variety. One particularly memorable behind-the-scenes story is that Cegavske once returned to her studio to find all of her dolls missing, only to discover that her mother had thrown them away. It seems mothers never quite understand the artistic process.
