Microscopic Art

London-based correspondent Nick Watt blogs about interviewing its creator: Driving to meet Willard Wigan I was expecting a timid fellow with a strange obsession. I thought our story would be about the art not the man. I was wrong. It’s difficult to capture Wigan’s art on television and it’s difficult to capture him. He’s confident, engaging and eloquent. Then he explains he can’t read or write and that he was driven to micro art when, as a lonely five-year-old, he would bunk off school and watch ants in the grass. I guess spending hours and years of your life hunched over a tiny sculpture in a semi-trance does something to your inner equilibrium. (At left, Wigan’s "The Wizard of Oz" from his website.)
And the art: The first thing Wigan showed me was an eyelash that he held up to the light. I could make out what looked like a speck of dirt on one end. Under the microscope, Charlie Chaplin complete with cane, hat and mustache. Wigan doesn’t just make tiny sculptures. He actually makes those sculptures look like real people. “If someone says, oh look, a pirate. Then what’s great about that?” he told me with a shrug. “But if they say, ‘wow, that’s Johnny Depp…” The other thing I can’t get my head around is that he really doesn’t enjoy doing the work. He has to force himself to work. His only satisfaction is finishing a piece then having chumps like us stare in wide-eyed disbelief at what’s he’s created.