"Out in back, the bamboo have dropped pale yellow leaves to the point that just the tops of the stepstones stick out. The neighbors cats love to crap in them, so it's pretty dangerous to stumble off the path. In front, the magnolias are dropping bud cases that startle you, looking like dead mice or birds. Of course, it all has to be cleaned up. We don't have a leaf blower, so when the sound of steel rake on concrete finally gets to you — you develop a sort of finesse where you just skim above the surface. They should make the rake fingers out of that stuff they put in cigarette lighter flints — you could rake at night and it'd look cool."

When I started this piece this afternoon, the 36 stix were all the same length as the center ones are now — so the whole thing converged. The negative space in back was sort of an interesting maltese cross sort of thing. After fooling with the volumetric stuff (and getting some real corny stuff with hard shadow flares and streamers) I left it to render on the G4 and started another one on the iMac.

I had in mind to cut away the back of the stack to change the way you saw the convergence, maybe even line the apparent back of the thing up so that it looked like a flat plane from the front, and started with a big boolean ball. I'd forgotten boolean cuts killed the colors and I wasn't about to go through that again.

So — it didn't do anything notable. Then I started changing the length of the stack "rings" a group at a time. After the 1st I could see that it was going to work. I thought it would be neat if it worked out to be a prime progression or something, but it seems pretty arbitrary. With the stack equispaced, to make it look as though the back plane is perceptually flat and even (but cognitively you _know_ it's wrong!) it ended up being 2-5-10 with the center quad being the longest.

It would be interesting to take some 1 x 2 x 20 foot colored rectangular solids and fool with them until you got this perspective...

Anyway — there's no way to figure out what's going on here without seeing the position and light schematic, so I composited a couple of views to show you how it got to where it is.

(Looks Russian, no? Malevich? Someone like that?)