While most people see a toothpick as nothing more than a small wooden stick to pry popcorn husks from between their teeth, Steven Backman sees raw material.
With a straight-edge razor, he dismantles a single toothpick into hairlike strands and uses them to build miniatures of iconic sites and objects, including the Golden Gate Bridge, the Liberty Bell and, most recently, a Noah’s ark that stands just 23.9 millimeters tall.
“It’s not just toothpicks, there’s a lot of emotions connected here,” the San Francisco resident said. “My heart and soul is enveloped in my art.”
The biblical boat is one of the many sculptures he has created from toothpicks, his medium of choice.
“I always wanted to make Noah’s ark,” Backman, 59, said. “I didn’t know in what magnitude or in what capacity I’d be able to do it. But this time I decided: You know what? Let’s make one from a single toothpick.”
Backman has been working with toothpicks for more than 50 years. He completed his first toothpick sculpture at age 5: a house with a popsicle stick fence he made for a Sunday school project at San Francisco’s Congregation Beth Israel Judea (now Congregation Am Tikvah) where he became a bar mitzvah.
“Even though we weren’t observant, even though we weren’t Orthodox,” he said, “we were religious, meaning we believed in God.”
His parents supported his hobby, especially his mother.
“She was always my inspiration,” he said. “She was very artistically inclined — great [at] decorating and making art. My father was very mechanically inclined. So I used both of their talents together.”
His grandmother told him “all artists should have a day job,” Backman said, so he worked at a bank and earned a degree in industrial design from San Francisco State University. But what he can accomplish with toothpicks has been his passion.
Now retired, toothpick art occupies him full time.
His unconventional medium is particularly unforgiving and requires immense patience, although Backman said that outside of this, he has little patience for banal tasks.
“I’m the most impatient person in the world. I don’t like waiting on line,” he said. “You know how people put you on hold on a call? I don’t like that.”
The Noah’s ark sculpture is his first biblical toothpick model and was inspired by Backman’s fond childhood memory of the early 1970s Noah’s ark campaign, in which Arco gas stations gave children miniature pairs of giraffes, elephants and lions to fill up a plastic ark, free with their parent’s purchase of eight gallons of gas.
The art took multiple eight-hour sessions to complete. Backman said he takes a break only to wash his hands of Elmer’s glue, which he uses to adhere the toothpick shavings.
The artist has received accolades and national media attention for his work. In 2014, Backman earned a Guinness World Record for the world’s smallest toothpick sculpture of the Empire State Building, standing 19.86 millimeters tall.
Miniatures of the Louvre and Buckingham Palace are on his list now.
He doesn’t just work small, though.
His 13-foot-long Golden Gate Bridge model made from 30,000 toothpicks resides at the Ripley’s Believe it or Not! in San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf.
His advice to younger people following their passion?
“For all young artists out there, just keep on working hard to get your art out there,” he said. “If you love something and you do it, the money will come, the money will follow.”