Holy Serendipity

If there ever is a reason to flaunt the word serendipity this is it. Thursday I went to my critique group and read a scene from my dark fairy tale that takes place within a labyrinth. The maze I described was complex, and my partners asked if I could draw it. “Yikes,” was my first thought.
Friday dawned clear and warm. I headed out for a long beach walk, musing on how I was going to tackle a maze drawing not being a) an artist, b) a puzzle-maker, c) a farmer with a corn field.
As I walked under the pier, I noticed a young woman ahead making a large drawing in the damp sand. Beyond her, a young man was doing the same. There were more than a dozen people busy making circular designs. They were drawing labyrinths!
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Spooky music? Celestial horns? Drum roll? I mean, this is pretty serendipitous, is it not?


So I approached the girl and asked if they were in a club or something that likes to draw mazes. I mean, there are clubs for everything, right?

But, no, they’re students in an architecture class being taught by Ben Nicholson of the Art Institute of Chicago.

And Mr. Nicholson is so nice he invited me to hang around with them. We even all held hands in a big circle—but I’m getting ahead of myself.

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First thing I learned was to begin a labyrinth with a cross. (see illustration)

Then you put L-shapes and dots in each quadrant. After that it gets tricky. Lines are drawn from an end of the cross or L or dot to a point in another quadrant, thus creating the pathways. I practiced a lot. Sand is forgiving, but I won’t be earning a degree in labyrinth making any time soon.

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Mr. Nicholson talked about the perfection of a beach as a drawing surface, how the horizon is wide and can be used to set horizontal lines, how a penny can be dropped in the sand as a radius to the center of the earth. “On the beach you have, natively, the axis to the world,” he said. And, it suddenly felt very momentous standing there in one of my favorite places.
And then he did one of my favorite things, he told an ancient Greek story about shipwrecked sailors who swim to shore and see geometric drawings and conclude that means they’ve found civilization.

Oh, and then there was the hand-holding. We stood in a large circle, arms stretched wide so our hands strained against one another and walked around and around and around, always keeping eye contact with the person directly across the circle. This led to giggles since there was a dizzying strenuousness to it. After our tramping feet had made the widest circle our group could make in the sand, we squished forward into a tight knot and gave it a bulls-eye. “Any group can make the largest circle and the smallest. Where’s the sun’s axis?” Using his own shadow he drew it in.
One of the things I liked most about stumbling into this class were Mr. Nicholson’s prompts for observation. He may be teaching students about architecture but anyone can benefit from being aware of surroundings. Notice how the sun changes its place in the sky by hour and by season, how its light falls differently on familiar objects, how you can ascertain direction if you know where it will be on the horizon.
Not only did I learn useful real world stuff, I got a few ideas for my characters and story from this encounter. Serendipity is a wondrous thing.
Now back to practicing maze-drawing… I've a long way to go.