http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/12823510/

Um. Yeah. I had these 6 x 6 clayboard squares, and thought “Hey, I’ve never done a triptych before!” and this sorta came out. It’s a small weirdness, not much more. Might be a Gearworld piece. The jury is often out for awhile on whether things are Gearworld or not.

Occasionally I feel like some sort of historian or anthropologist, perhaps more accurately, trying to put together a clear view of some region I’ve never visited, based on a collection of postcards, not all of which are even from the right region. Except it’s worse than that, because I have to PAINT the bloody postcards as well, and Herodotus I ain’t.

The funny thing is that I could sort of…I dunno…bend Gearworld to my will if I really wanted to. I could start dictating what it is and what it isn’t, and what goes where, and naming places, the way I do Digger’s universe or the continent that “Black Dogs” was set on, or what not. I could dig out graph paper and draw maps. There’s a very distinctive sense that I Am Creating Stuff Now when you do that. I could say “This here is like this and it’s always like this, because I say so.” I could make Gearworld do that if I really wanted to. I think.

But I find myself reluctant to try that, as if that’d wreck something vital about it–it’d become just one of my made up worlds instead of some kind of tenuous link to the murky squishy nether regions of my brain. (I don’t know if it even IS that, mind you, but I’d like to think so.) So I don’t. My work is often silly, frequently even trivial, but Gearworld is something that seems to having something behind it. (This could just be wishful thinking on my part, but I cling to the notion.) So I don’t try to dictate what it is too hard. Even if occasionally it seems like it’d be a lot easier that way.

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