I have a hard time putting figures in Gearworld. Sometimes a painting really NEEDS a figure, too, but getting one in is the artistic equivalent of trying to ride a greased weasel bareback. The painting rebels. Something about the way that Gearworld is arranged in my brain makes it very hard to get a figure to click. And you need a figure because that gives you scale and scope and purpose, and something to identify with, makes it a place, however weird. You can put yourself in the figure's shoes. In the other stuff, the surrealist stuff, say, it's easy--throw in a small mammal and people identify with them, a lot more easily than human figures in a sense--the human figure has to be compared to yourself, and is so obviously Other, but there's a kind of Aesop's fable quality to animal figures, it distills down traits so easily. We know we're not any given human figure, but we're also generally pretty aware of our inner frightened mouse or baffled lizard. It's hard to know what's going on in another person's head, but we can all be Sir Bunny for a minute. If that makes any sense.

Gearworld though...phew. Small mammals don't work well there. There's a frivolity to them that's just out of place. Gearworld is too stark and complicated and cruel for hamsters--they'd wind up nailed to walls with wires and dead fish as some kind of freaky bone fetish or something. (Doubtless there are areas of Gearworld where hamsters can roam free, but I haven't seen them yet.) So I'm generally back to people again, and that's hard, because while I can handle painting people, they stubbornly remain Someone Else Other Than You.*

I was doodling the bear golem figure here, and staring vaguely through the page, and NPR said something about Islamic dress being banned in some school somewhere, and my brain ground gears in a fashion that would cause a mechanic great emotional anguish, and said "Hey, what about a chador?" Which is ironic, because I've been doing a webcomic with a veiled character for years, and all the emotion's expressed in the eyelids and eyebrows, and I hadn't even thought of it. But it was almost exactly what I wanted. The eyelids do all the heavy lifting, but because you can't see the whole face, it could be practically anybody back there. Including the viewer, almost, including the artist, including anybody. And Gearworld was okay with that. It didn't fight back. I painted this whole piece in about nine hours, and it went together with no more than the usual agonies. So for all I know, there may be more women in chadors lurking in the concrete corridors. We'll see.

As for what the heck the Bear Golem is, or why she appears to be unplugging it, or anything like that--well, hell, I'm just the artist, I can't be expected to know these things...

Prints of these available, and I'll maybe go for a 16 x 20 LE run, too, if I can get it set up...


*For no real reason I can put my finger on, nudes are far and away the closest to weaselling around this. There is a weird universality to nudity. Go figure.