Picture mazes are normally the stuff of elementary school work sheets or kiddie menus, but in the hands of Matthew Haussler, they become serious art — and potentially a Guinness World Record.
Using a 3-foot-wide roll of paper, Haussler, 29, has drawn 13 feet of a Chicago-inspired picture maze he expects to approach 100 feet sometime this fall. That would put him ahead of Joe Wos, a Pittsburgh cartoonist who holds what appears to be the unofficial record for the largest hand-drawn maze, at 4-by-34 feet.
But Haussler, who lives in the Chicago suburb of Hanover Park, says the possible record would be just a side benefit to an art form he has grown to love.
“It’s really meditative,” he said. “I can spend hours just zoning in.”
He started off several years ago doodling geometric mazes during breaks from his bank job, then decided to go in a more ambitious direction, turning the Roman Colosseum into a labyrinth.
“I started showing it to people, asking, ‘Can you tell what it is?’” he said. “They’d say, ‘It’s the Colosseum.’ I said, ‘OK, it works,’ so I tried a few more and really developed the art form.”
He soon added landscapes, portraits and sports scenes to his portfolio. He posted some work online and attracted the attention of Minnesota toy manufacturer MindWare, which will publish two books of Haussler’s mazes later this year.
Unlike some maze-makers, Haussler incorporates his passageways into a larger image. His latest project begins with a view looking west from Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium, a perspective that will move clockwise to capture the nearby Adler Planetarium and Field Museum before heading north through Grant Park toward Buckingham Fountain.
From there, the maze will head west into the Loop, though Haussler isn’t sure where it will end.
“I would love to keep going as long as I can,” he said, noting that his roll of paper is 1,000 feet long. “We’ve got a long way until I hit Wisconsin.”
One challenge is making sure the path remains unbroken. Haussler keeps notes to remind himself of the route; because he works almost exclusively in ink; creating a dead end would sink his world record ambitions (using Wite-Out to correct an error is considered cheating among serious maze-makers).
“Right now I’m in a really tough spot because if I close off by accident one of the paths I have, then I’ve closed the whole thing off,” he said.
Wos, the Pittsburgh artist, said he is still working on the documentation to make his world record official. Once that’s done, he plans to do another project on an even grander scale.
His friendly rivalry with Haussler comes second to the idea of turning mazes into something worthy of a museum.
“Mazes and labyrinths have been around for thousands of years,” he said. “You still see them in churches, in tiles on the floor. They’re exercises in contemplation. We’re trying to restore that idea they can be an art form.”
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