Evelyn Rydz (Master of Fine Arts '05) didn't know how to respond when she showed her pen-and-ink drawings to an acquaintance a year ago: he took one look at the strange, otherworldly images and marveled, "I never knew you were such a lunatic."

At first glance, Rydz's art does look as if it was created late at night in a hallucinogenic haze (it wasn't). In one drawing, tangled roots and vines appear to morph into a construction crane and a billowing smokestack; in another, lopsided traffic cones rise out of a swampy terrain alongside withered trees.
Grand in scalesome of the pieces are scrolls that stretch up to 30 feet longyet filled with intricately detailed "micro-habitats," as Rydz calls them, the drawings actually originate from photographs she takes on her travels and neighborhood walks. It's a technique, Rydz realized recently, that she picked up from her father, a former architect who took photographs of construction sites. "I was always looking at his blueprints and his Polaroids," Rydz says. "I'm interested in the idea of buildings as malleable surfaces in a fluid landscape. Construction sites are places of constant change."

What doesn't seem to change is Rydz's intense dedicationboth to her own creative process and to bringing art into other people's lives. She starts her days in the studio at 7am , cutting and pasting her photographs, then using each resulting collage as the basis for a drawing. Rydz also works as the director of GASP, a Boston gallery co-founded by SMFA faculty member Magdalena Campos-Pons, and as a drawing instructor at both the Museum School and Tufts University. Then there are her weekly meetings with three local youth groups at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. They make and talk about art, with the goal of giving the kids a "real sense of ownership of the Museum," Rydz says, to show that it is "not just a static place where things get dusted off." In return, the kids bring to the Museum "a fresh, exciting perspective about art."

The same could be said about Rydz herself. This spring her dramatic drawings earned her a spot on the Boston Globe Magazine's list of "10 Artists to Watch." Perhaps being called a lunatic isn't such a bad thing after all.

Rydz's work can currently be seen at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and at the Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston. Blue Print Voyage, the collaborative youth project, opens May 20 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.