Maze Art, Where Dreams Collide is a blog about Marc Pena, whose work is a combination of mazes and art. It covers his life and the creation of his work. If you like his work, this blog will give you a more complete story.
Maze Art was created in February 2008 by David Kiehnle as an outlet for Marc Pena’s artworks. Maze Art will show the general public what can be achieved when imagination and creativity are combined with passion and hard work.
Marc’s artwork has been featured on the Discovery Channel, Discovery Kids, HGTV (Masters of Flip), DIY Network (Ace of Spaces), and Canada AM. He has also appeared as an expert on CityLine, CTV News Toronto and at the Ontario Science Centre. He has participated in many shows across North America including Kids Get Smart Day 2010 at the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto, Canada. Marc’s work has received awards from Mensa Canada, Global Game Jam 2011 and 2012 for his game Mazes for Hope, Top 25 Canadian innovations by Red Tricycle Magazine 2010-2012, the National Parenting Center Seal of Approval (2010-2012) and was featured at TEDx Toronto 2011.
Maze art is a combination of maze, art and travel. His work combines the allure of mazes with the beauty of art.
Maze art is an idea that was born in the mind of Marc Pena, an artist who was determined to find a way of bringing art to a more personal level for people. He wanted to find a way to enable people to have firsthand experiences. “I wanted them to be involved.”
So he made it happen in several different ways, but the end result is that hundreds of thousands have traveled through his creations and many more have seen his work displayed in books and magazines around the world.
The process begins with designing the artwork, which can take anywhere from six months to two years. Then, he builds it on any available property near his home along the coast of central California. So far, there are eight completed pieces that are open to the public.
This year he will add two new ones. One will be built at an amusement park in Murrieta and another at a private residence near Temecula, Calif., which will also serve as his studio. The public will be able to travel through this one as well as his others.”When I first started out with maze art my goal was simply to build
Maze Art is the name of the blog by Marc Pena, a self-taught artist and puzzle creator from Austin, Texas. While he has done many different paintings and drawings, he is most well-known for his mixed-media art pieces that incorporate mazes into their design. He has also created and sold custom puzzles to collectors. Maze paintings are challenging to create because they include both a painting and a maze in one piece of art. Each painting takes anywhere from 200 hours to over 1,000 hours to create, depending on its size and complexity.
Maze paintings often include other elements, such as tessellations or mathematical formulas. Although some people have attempted to create their own maze art, few are as good as Marc’s. His artwork has been featured in the LA Times, Huffington Post, the Dallas Observer and Art Fuse Magazine.
The first thing that many people notice about Marc PENA’s artwork is the level of detail involved in each piece. He uses a variety of media to create his work, including acrylics on canvas board or panel, oil pastels, colored pencils and digital drawing. The painting process begins with a black-and-white line drawing which is then painted using acrylic paints that are hand-mixed
The maze is a metaphor for the journey; the pieces of art are the destination.
The maze is organic, free-form and unpredictable. The art is manmade, geometric and ordered.
The maze inspires curiosity and exploration. The art inspires contemplation and appreciation.
The maze takes on its own life, separate from the one who created it; it has a personality of its own. The art becomes part of the architecture; it has no identity without its surroundings.
Marc Pena’s work embodies this yin-yang relationship between mazes and art.”
You might say Marc Pena has taken the concept of a maze and pushed it as far as it will go.
Pena’s mazes are not just fun to solve, they’re also fun to look at. That’s because they’re made out of recycled materials like cardboard and paper tubes, which gives them a whimsical quality. They’re also incredibly detailed, with the designer using hand tools to build walls that look like rusted metal and cracked stone that looks like real rock.
The work is even more impressive when you consider that Pena does all the work himself. He doesn’t rely on someone else to cut his cardboard for him or paint his walls for him. He builds every single piece of his mazes by hand, from scratch.
And he does a lot of other amazing things with cardboard too. He makes tables, chairs and other furniture, including some amazing chairs that are literally shaped like knots made out of rope.”
Pena, a Los Angeles-based artist, is a maze aficionado, and his site has more than 100 examples of the genre. In addition to the two-dimensional mazes, there are also three-dimensional ones — made from wood, metal and plastic — that you can walk through. And if you are really ambitious, you can create your own maze using Pretty Mazes, his software that allows you to build a maze from scratch.
You may think such creations have limited appeal. But Pena insists they serve an important purpose. “Mazes are all around us,” he said in an e-mail message. “Everything is a labyrinth.” He added: “We are born as a series of passages; we die as a series of passages; everything in between is a labyrinth.”
Trying to navigate them is not easy. It’s like walking into a room with no doors, windows or exits and trying to figure out how to get out. There are no wrong turns — it just requires patience and perseverance.
Pena says that the mazes he features on his site are “maze-like” rather than traditional mazes that have one solution. Instead of arrows telling you which way to go, viewers must rely on their own
A labyrinth is a maze that has only one path. In Pena’s maze art, the labyrinths are as intriguing as his other works.
While at work on his master’s degree he discovered the world of maze makers. These people were passionate about their art and willing to spend hours perfecting each pathway. He started making mazes for himself, which allowed him to see how far he could push the concept of what a maze could be.
Pena makes mazes out of just about anything, from paper to glass to walls, but he works primarily with concrete in a process called “indirect casting.” He starts by creating a design on graph paper and then adds details such as texture and color with paint markers. The result is a 3-D structure that appears like it has been carved out of stone. He then uses an industrial vibrating table to pour concrete over the design and cures it in the sun.
When asked why he enjoys working with concrete, Pena says that it’s a fun medium to work with because it’s forgiving if you make mistakes and doesn’t require much maintenance. And while some artists use this medium to mimic more traditional materials such as marble or steel, Pena prefers working with concrete because it still appears unconventional despite being one of
