turning over another spadeful of room...
I dug out a stack of old maze books. A big hit of nostalgia there.
I don't remember exactly when I first discovered mazes. It was early in my childhood. I liked all sorts of puzzles, but there was something so compelling about a well-structured maze. Even though it would be many years before I learned about the spiritual traditions of labyrinths, these twisting patterns were the closest thing I had to ritual meditation. The more I explored them, the more I could get a sense of how the area I was focusing on was related to the whole.
So I sought out all the books of mazes I could get my hands on. The organic forms of Rolf Myller, the nested symmetries of Ruth Heller, the manicured pictographs of Vladimir Koziakin... I dove headfirst into all of them. And among my journeys, two artists stood out as my favorites, because they combined graphic excellence with the vision to take the medium to places I'd never imagined before.
This piece by Greg Bright drew from standard elements, squares and rectangles, and warped them into a very different landscape. (The objective is to get from "1" to "2".) Back in 1973, before easy access to computers, it must have been a challenge for him to create this by hand:
Bright was always experimenting, even willing to try approaches that may have antagonized the reader. A couple of his works consisted of black paths on white backgrounds, making it almost impossible for me to trace them with my trusty pencil. I still did my best to solve them, though.
And then came Larry Evans, who introduced me to 'three-dimensional' mazes. Although most of his works were variations on the same innovation, I never got tired of them, since it was an innovation that vastly expanded the entire vocabulary of the medium. It wasn't just because his creations had overlapping paths, which opened up the potential for much more sophisticated routing systems; these were a whole different kind of virtual environment. This particular piece, from 1978, is also special because it's essentially four interlocking mazes. Each set of in and out arrows is discrete from the others, and they just happen to share the same page:
Incidentally, only three of the in arrows lead to out arrows. The fourth set is a red herring. Evans introduced me to a maze that couldn't be solved, and managed to present it in such a way that my young self didn't feel too betrayed.
Naturally, as a kid who was into drawing, I made plenty of mazes of my own. Most of them I didn't take the time to plan out, and they didn't work very well. A few turned out pretty well, all things considered.
Gradually my obsession gave way to other obsessions. I went through a long period when I didn't think about mazes at all. But I'm sure I had already laid some of the groundwork inside my brain that I still manage to use today.
I don't remember exactly when I first discovered mazes. It was early in my childhood. I liked all sorts of puzzles, but there was something so compelling about a well-structured maze. Even though it would be many years before I learned about the spiritual traditions of labyrinths, these twisting patterns were the closest thing I had to ritual meditation. The more I explored them, the more I could get a sense of how the area I was focusing on was related to the whole.
So I sought out all the books of mazes I could get my hands on. The organic forms of Rolf Myller, the nested symmetries of Ruth Heller, the manicured pictographs of Vladimir Koziakin... I dove headfirst into all of them. And among my journeys, two artists stood out as my favorites, because they combined graphic excellence with the vision to take the medium to places I'd never imagined before.
This piece by Greg Bright drew from standard elements, squares and rectangles, and warped them into a very different landscape. (The objective is to get from "1" to "2".) Back in 1973, before easy access to computers, it must have been a challenge for him to create this by hand:
Bright was always experimenting, even willing to try approaches that may have antagonized the reader. A couple of his works consisted of black paths on white backgrounds, making it almost impossible for me to trace them with my trusty pencil. I still did my best to solve them, though.
And then came Larry Evans, who introduced me to 'three-dimensional' mazes. Although most of his works were variations on the same innovation, I never got tired of them, since it was an innovation that vastly expanded the entire vocabulary of the medium. It wasn't just because his creations had overlapping paths, which opened up the potential for much more sophisticated routing systems; these were a whole different kind of virtual environment. This particular piece, from 1978, is also special because it's essentially four interlocking mazes. Each set of in and out arrows is discrete from the others, and they just happen to share the same page:
Incidentally, only three of the in arrows lead to out arrows. The fourth set is a red herring. Evans introduced me to a maze that couldn't be solved, and managed to present it in such a way that my young self didn't feel too betrayed.
Naturally, as a kid who was into drawing, I made plenty of mazes of my own. Most of them I didn't take the time to plan out, and they didn't work very well. A few turned out pretty well, all things considered.
Gradually my obsession gave way to other obsessions. I went through a long period when I didn't think about mazes at all. But I'm sure I had already laid some of the groundwork inside my brain that I still manage to use today.