Alex Queral's carved phone book art

These amazingly detailed celebrity faces may look like sketches but they are in fact carved out of unwanted phone books

Alex Queral does these wonderful heads, carved out of phone books (then painted with
acrylics). In his Artist's Statement, he says:

I carve the faces out of phone books because I like the three-dimensional quality that results and because of the unexpected results that occur working in this medium. The three-dimensional quality enhances the feeling of the pieces as an object as opposed to a picture.

In carving and painting a head from a phone directory, I'm celebrating the individual lost in the anonymous list of thousands of names that describe the size of the community. In addition, I like the idea of creating something that is normally discarded every year into an object of longevity.

Check out more about this work here