The title of this project is an hommage to a short story with the same title written by the late R.A. Lafferty, which in turn is an hommage to a work entitled “The World as Will and Idea” by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

This is the final image:

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The conceit of the image is that the viewer is standing at the entrance to a long corridor with the light from a well-illuminated area (possibly the outdoors) at his back. The corridor extends through a region of increasing dimness until it approaches a brightly-lit ascending stairway, which casts a glow along the far end of the corridor.

The walls of the corridor are covered in wallpaper with an embossed damask pattern. The floor is carpeted with a pattern of Celtic knots, and bears evidence of being scuffed by passing feet. The ceiling is covered with sheet metal in an old-fashioned raised pattern, and features embedded lights which cast very little illumination on the floor below.

The first step in the construction of the image is to lay out a simplified three-dimensional schematic of the length of the corridor, with various points and areas marked for detailed analysis:

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Just as in Patterns of Baroque Shadow, a series of “studies” is required. The example below shows a study of some of the mathematical calculations used to plan the distribution of light and shadow in the illuminated area at the foot of the staircase:

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The three tiles used for the floor, walls, and ceiling of the corridor are the Damask pattern (for the walls), the Celtic Knot (for the floor), and the Screen pattern (for the ceiling):

The Damask pattern has been adapted to include built-in shadows of the design elements, which produce a raised feel for the wallpaper. The viewer expects that he would experience the sensation of embossed velvet (or possibly satin) if he were able to run his hand across the wallpaper.
The Celtic Knot pattern on the floor is contrived so that each twine of the knot extends at the edges to join seamlessly with the next tile in the pattern.
The Screen pattern has been augmented with built-in shadows, similar to those used for the Damask pattern. They make the ceiling look three-dimensional, as if it were covered in sheet metal in a style reminiscent of a restaurant or emporium from the early 1900s. The lights are embedded separately in the center of each Screen tile in the final product.

As a spinoff from the creation of the final image, I made three studies using the same tiles, but in a two-dimensional format. The patterns shown below are not utilized in the three-dimensional image, but stand alone as examples of the way clines and chromatized patterns can be employed to turn simple tiled patterns into complex designs.

First the Damask pattern, with both vertical and horizontal transitions of color and brightness:

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Next the Celtic Knot, utilized in a somewhat different form. The center of each tile glows, as if the elements of the design comprised a heating element, with each tile glowing red-hot at the center. The horizontal transitions successively transform the color of the central glow in each tile:

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The Screen element is employed in a fashion similar to the ceiling in the final image, but the transitions are not exactly the same:

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Once again, the final image:

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