When An Artist Grabs,

a hammer and chisel, I normally expect to see a block of marble,

photographs and videos, Natnael Mekuria/Instagram, not a sheet of laminated glass! but that is the preferred medium of Ethiopian-born artist Natnael Mekuria,

as you can imagine at first the glass canvas shattered, so he would spend hours chiselling at it only to have it break into pieces before finishing, but he triumphed, Natnael begins by mapping the outline of the design on the glass pane and then proceeds to produce small cracks in the glass using a small metal chisel and a hammer. In order to obtain the desired result, he has to control the size of the cracks by hitting the chisel with varying degrees of force,

“It took a lot of practice and patience to master this technique,” the artist writes in his LinkedIn bio. “But I didn’t give up. I kept practicing and learning, and over time, I was able to develop a consistent and reliable method for creating glass portraits.”

Mekuria was born in 2001 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and immigrated to the United States in 2008. He has since been living in the District of Columbia, making a living off of his intriguing cracked glass artworks. He has found success on social media, for more photographs and videos have a look here at his TikTok page, hammer, chisel, glass, amazing!