Photo By Mark Roessler

While William Sillin’s vibrant, dynamic oil landscapes of sweeping vistas and lush flora are displayed in galleries and museums and on collectors’ walls, it’s the giant portraits he renders from cornstalks and earth each fall that attract the most attention. For ten years now, the Sunderland-based artist has been creating corn mazes in the fields of his neighbor’s farm. Each year features a  portrait of a new celebrity or icon (Babe Ruth and King Tut, for example) that covers up to six acres of tightly planted stalks.

Preview Massachusetts: Where did the corn maze idea come from, and how did you get involved?
Will Sillin: Mike Wissemann has been a friend of mine ever since we both moved to this area back in the early ‘80s. Another mutual friend went to Dave’s Mega Maze in Sterling [Massachusetts], and he came back and said, “Mike, you ought to do a corn maze! People could see it from Mount Sugarloaf.” Mike’s first reaction was, “Yeah, that’s just what I want: a bunch of strangers walking around my farm yard with all its old equipment.” But after we talked about it, he said, “All right. I’ll do it. But only if Will will be my partner.”

So we started small with a four-acre lot. We had a lot of fun and decided to do it again, bigger, the next year. The picture was the Mona Lisa. It was a huge success for us. WFCR did a story, then Channel Five in Boston. My sister-in-law who lived in California called me up and said she was in her kitchen watching a report about our maze on CNN. By the end of that year, Ripley’s Believe It or Not called us.

PM: Tell me about the process of taking an image and turning it into a corn maze.
WS: We spend the winter discussing whose portrait is going to be featured. This year, Mike said he wanted it to be Darwin. I find pictures in books and magazines, and then on the computer I trace the lines over the portrait that will become the paths through the maze. Then I try to connect up features so they’re integrated through the whole field. I try to find a way to hook up the eyes, through the nose, to the mouth, through the cheeks—somehow to connect the whole thing. That’s really the hardest part.

PM: How do you translate it from the page to the corn?
WS: In late May, Mike plants the corn in two directions so the field is solid corn, without rows to walk, and I mark off the field with little flags, working inside a grid of three-foot by three-foot squares. When the corn’s about a foot high, I tug out the plants where the paths are going to go. As it grows up, the leaves begin to fill in, and you can’t see it any more. In early August, we go in and cane the trails.
Then we set up the game. Each year we like to have different things for people to find in the maze that relate to our portrait. This year with Charles Darwin, I wanted the game to be about the exploration and discovery of life. So we had rubber stamps of animals hidden around the maze, and you could put a stamp on your map to indicate where you found it. Another year, for Louis Armstrong, my son made these chimes from different lengths of metal tubing, and when you ran a stick along them, they played different tunes and you had to identify them.

PM: Have any years not worked out so well?
WS: There was one year, 2005, where we got so discouraged that we weren’t sure we’d come back again. We did Albert Einstein: it was a beautiful maze, but we had so much bad weather and it was so much hard work. We’d be over there pumping out the maze, just hoping if the sun broke through for a little bit, we could get a few people through.

PM: Has anyone ever got lost?
WS: We give everyone flags to wave if they need to be rescued, but people don’t use them much. One year we saw a flag go up, and when I went in I found this group of college students who had been in there for hours and were fed up. Another time, this lady who was eight and a half months pregnant got worn down by the heat and needed help. I just happened to be going through the maze checking on things. I’d never have seen her if I hadn’t been there. We helped her out and she was fine.

PM: What happens to the corn after the season’s done?
WS: Mike’s now set up so he can actually use the corn from the field to heat his greenhouses, his garage, office, and he’s also got a corn-burning furnace at home.