Chicago maze artist Matthew Haussler broke the Guinness World Record for the longest hand-drawn maze with his 73.5-foot creation on display at Block Thirty Seven shopping mall, 108 N. State St.

Haussler studied music in Tennessee before becoming an artist. After graduation, he worked as an accountant at US Bank for two years, performed in bands at theme parks and appeared as an extra on hit shows like “Chicago P.D.”

Haussler said he started drawing mazes after he transferred to Chicago to work for US Bank. After he signed a book deal with MindWare, an educational toy manufacturer, he turned his hobby into a career.

The Chronicle spoke with Haussler about his career, creating maze art and his future as an artist.

The Chronicle: Why did you start drawing mazes?

Matthew Haussler: I was in Oregon, I was a banker there, and I would take breaks and kind of clear my head by doodling, and so I started by drawing them there. Once I got transferred here, I started spending a lot of time inside. At the time, I was married and my wife was pregnant, and it was our first winter in Chicago, so we were inside quite a bit. I started messing around, seeing if I could draw mazes into colosseums and mazes into different perspective drawings and things like that. What ended up happening is mazes came from that exploration of drawing the space around the spaces and trying to make them into something that would draw the eye in.

Do you have a favorite maze that you’ve drawn?

My favorite piece is the Chicago bean maze that I have done recently in the last few weeks. That one is my favorite because it works with reflection.

How long did it take you to draw the longest maze ever hand-drawn?

That one took me eight months. I started it last June and it took me a little over 300 hours.

Was it your goal going into this project to draw the world’s longest maze?

My goal was to break the record of the artist, who is a friend of mine in Pittsburgh, Joe Wos. He has a record of 120 square feet. I knew I wanted to break his, but he doesn’t do mazes like mine that look like an image. His are more like a maze with cartoons inside, more of what people think of when they think of mazes. Since mine are pictures as well, I knew my maze would have to be much longer because there is so much white space on mine. His was four feet high and 30 feet long. Mine is 73.5 feet long. It’s almost twice as long as his, but it’s just over square footage by five or six feet.

What do you want people to get from your artwork?

I want them to see mazes as an art form mainly because it gives some validity to what I do and to inspire kids to use a combination of creative and analytical skills. It takes both sides of the brain to make it work. My goal is to get people of all ages to interact with art, and hopefully, if they’re so inclined, to create their own, or at least to explore art in ways that they haven’t before.

What’s next for you?

One thing I’m working on now is getting a kid show based off the mazes—something that incorporates the mazes into a kid’s show about art and history and more of the humanities. My goal really is to get something together that’s the “Bill Nye” of art and history as opposed to science and math. I’ve been putting it together and hopefully this summer I’ll be filming it.

Have you ever thought about building life size mazes that people can walk through?

If the space was provided, I would love to design mazes. I have tried to connect with people who own cornfields, so I could do some corn mazes. It would be a different way to explore what I am doing on paper.