As an adolescent, Michel Nedjar became painfully aware of the Holocaust.

The tragic dolls he then began to make are reminiscent of this.

More Ex-Voto

An ex-voto is created when an individual's prayers for a miracle are answered. After praying to a saint for a miraculous healing, an individual would commission a local artist to create a small painting that would be hung in the local church as a public testimony of that individual's faith and gratitude for a miracle. Usually done on canvas or tin, ex-votos generally consist of three basic elements: the illustrative depiction of the event, the narrative, and the depiction of the saint or deity.



( can you stand more? )

Veijo Rönkkönen

In the Finnish town of Parikalla, close to the Russian border, lies one of the craziest attractions on the face of the planet – remarkable sculpture park consisting of some five hundred concrete figures that were all sculpted by the late Veijo Rönkkönen, a humble press worker and an artist with extraordinary dedication.

Veijo Rönkkönen was only 16 years old when he started working on his park. Veijo had recently got a job as a press worker in a paper mill in his hometown Parikkala, a job he held for 41 years. With his first pay check, he purchased ten apple tree seedlings and a bag of concrete to create a garden around his family home. For the next fifty years, until his death in 2010, he dedicated all his spare time and money planting flowers and trees and creating hundreds of caricature-like sculptures, mostly of full scale human figures. In that time, Rönkkönen managed to create over 500 statues to keep him company. Some of them are odd, and others are just plain terrifying.

( More photos - fascinating... )