Interview with a Maze Designer

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D D Stewart has sixty-one mazes scanned into his computer.  Apparently he has hundreds more at his disposal, just waiting for the privilege of becoming digitized.

I sit with him at a booth in a Boulder, Colorado Denny’s.  If the restaurant allowed smoking we would both be partaking.  He seems like he is anxious to step outside and have a cigarette.  He has not touched his “Grand Slam-which.”

Then I start to ask him questions about mazes.

What was your first maze like? 

“The manager was twenty-one and hired a staff of eighteen-year-olds.  Somewhere in middle of this crazy atmosphere, in a dead mall with no customers, I sat at the counter and drew this trippy maze.  That was the first one I ever did.  Not enough sleep… and working in a dead mall.”

How many mazes have you done all together?

“Several hundred since I was 18.  I’ve been doing it for fifteen years.”

Do you “do” mazes?  Do you play them?

“I collect maze books.  I’m able to go through mazes with my eyes, without a pen or pencil… I have to go through every single one of my own mazes because to draw a maze you have to go through it.  The way is not the path from beginning to end, but it is to go through every path and make sure there is one way through it.”

What’s the definition of a maze to you?

(There’s a long silence as D D sits across from me in the booth.)

“A beginning and an end and there’s an intricate path between… I’m able to do these in a lot of different mediums.  When I started doing mazes I would start with pencil and then outline it with permanent marker.  Then I would take white-out and make it look all pretty.  Next I would take it to Kinkos and make copies of it.  Then I copied that and redid it again and again.  I would make like six versions of one maze.  I’ve spent a lot of time at Kinkos just copying designs and redo-ing them with white-out.”

Currently you’re making mazes that serve as stand alone art pieces that hang on a wall?

“Now-a-days I do mazes in different mediums.  Pencil, pen, permanent marker, on computer software… Currently, I’m working in ‘Paint’ on Windows and making straight, pixilated lines and the end result is an optical illusion because I’ve situated lines into certain patterns.  The medium itself creates the complicated design.  It’s the background I create that’s the focus now.  It’s what I do before I draw a maze that creates the maze now.  I’ve designed simple walking mazes before and it is something I would like to do again.  A museum, an amusement park, a Halloween event; there are lots of places I could design something really neat if the right people were involved.  I had a lot of fun at an Art Walk one year, putting down an eighty-foot by twenty-foot maze on the sidewalk in front of Stonebridge Games on Main Street.  You could enter on either the North or South side, find your way to the store entrance, and then back out the maze the other direction.  Kids and adults both had fun trying to find their way in and out.”

Above: A scale model of the walking maze design by D D Stewart with two entrances on the sidewalk that lead to the entrance of a store.

“In the future I would like to find someone who can invest a lot of money into a restaurant with three floors.  Before you get to the entrance of the restaurant you have to journey through two floors of mazes.  I’ve even figured out the proper fire codes to adhere to for this project.”

D D sees promise in looking for newspapers and magazines to publish his mazes.  He also likes the idea of making a book to sell online both digitally and physically.

“A big one, you can put it on a coffee table in the living room even. Maybe selling it in other countries is a possibility, too.”

He also likes the idea of using mazes as Brain Therapy.

“Thinking therapy… Brain therapy…  Mazes are complicated and have to do with problem solving.  Mazes could be marketed to people with brain injuries or for brain training.”

Interview originally done back on 6-12-2015.

Photo Selfie: D D Stewart

Update 2018: 

• Visit www.kulsiz.com or buy D D’s maze books off Amazon as “Print on Demand” here.
• That Denny’s is closed permanently, now.
• The interviewer doesn’t smoke cigarettes anymore.
• facebook.com/Kulsiz

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