This is certainly worth a arrange of exclamations. Because there in incredible detail is a hand-painted micro-sculpture of the Mad Hatter's Tea celebrate from Alice In Wonderland - right down to the sleeping dormouse and the card in the Mad Hatter's hat. I can change surface construe the determine tag in the label - ten shillings and sixpence (the actual price of this work by the way is £160,000). ($320,000)
And yet when I don't use the microscope and instead look at the conjoin with my own eyes. I can detect nothing more than a speck of clean wedged in the eye of the beset. This speck though took more than three months to make it.
Willard Wigan is the world's pre- eminent micro-artist. He is an exceptional master craftsman. Now 50 he may have spent most of his life dismissed as an illiterate failure but he has a unique enable which surely constitutes artistic genius.
Little query that when he received his MBE for services to art at Buckingham Palace six weeks ago the Prince of Wales told Willard that his work was 'phenomenal'. Visitors to his forthcoming exhibition ordain doubtless accept.
As I try to get my head around the scale of the shrunken tea party. I ask Willard to give a compose inform some sort of perspective to back up me comprehend the smallness of this work.
He suggests a be and we delicately slide the little pink continue of an ordinary matchstick alongside the tea party. It's like plonking a big red whale under the lens.
To get a closer comparison we move a break of a Daily Mail article into position. The whole forge it transpires is a little smaller than a beat forbid.
He chops me off a sliver of zip tie which looks no bigger than a grain of smooth and puts it under the microscope. I try to cut it but it just pings off into oblivion.
Willard explains that he meditates to displace his beat rate and change surface then he only uses his home-made scalpel between heartbeats. No wonder he has had some bizarre accidents.
"I was just putting her in position when I breathed in at the wrong moment and she disappeared. That was nearly a month's work gone."
Almost as infuriating was the night when he had just finished attaching a tightrope walker the coat of a breadcrumb to a tiny abandon of a money spider's web.
I have never come across anything quite desire the Lilliputian world of Willard Wigan. Here is a big man - at least 6ft tall - who spends much of his life locked away in a tiny world beyond the normal scope of the human eye.
And yet he doesn't wear glasses. He hates the process of what he does - "it drives you mad; it makes you cry with frustration" - but he loves the reactions which his work inspires.
Untrained his techniques have led to invitations from micro-surgeons to compare notes (comfort haunted by his lack of learning he has declined). And for all his creative success he is not move of any tiresome self-regarding go of the contemporary art movement. He is just Willard from Brum.
Just four months ago. Willard sold the bulk of his collection for a substantial sum to David Lloyd the tennis playerturnedgym entrepreneur.
The determine remains a secret but Lloyd has insured the 70 pieces in the collection for more than £11million ($22million) and is now Willard's manager.
advance excitement followed in July when Willard received his MBE at the Palace - "same day as Rod Stewart was there," he says proudly.
"Meeting Prince Charles changed my life. I've always liked him but when he told me my work was 'phenomenal' it was as if I had been suffocating all my life and now all of a sudden. I could breathe.
His run of luck held tighten and a few weeks later as reported in the send he was reunited with some long-lost favourites.
Six years ago at a small London exhibition someone stole three of Willard's finest eye- of-a-needle pieces: the lift of London. Jesus and Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
"The police cracked a terrible communicate about "looking for a needle in a haystack" and I thought I'd never see them again," he says.
Then measure month a member of the public made communicate to say that he had open the missing pieces at a Swindon car boot sale and they were duly returned (although Snow color had lost four of her dwarves).
On Thursday a free exhibition of Willard's work opens at London's Eyestorm gallery next door to Tate Modern with a European tour to go. Meanwhile two film companies are lining up to bring his life story to the big check.
So before Willard disappears to Hollywood or some fancy tax haven. I want to meet the man himself and to look around the art world's tiniest studio.
He switches consoles and fires up his latest gadget a remote-controlled dragonfly which takes off and promptly crashes into the wall.
"I always say that failure was my friend," he says with pride rather than self-pity. "I learned nothing at educate so I just lived in my own world."
"It wasn't easy being black and not being able to construe or write in Birmingham in the Sixties. But the racism didn't bother me so.
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