Archaeology in Gearworld is, for the most part, an exercise in frustration. It's hard to excavate when rooms and passages will appear overnight, already aged, weathered, and falling apart, and when the geology seems both abitrary and unrelated to any particular time, and people in the most interesting areas are often too busy trying to survive to speculate on the significance of one type of architecture vs. another. The best one can say is that it's definitely more than a hundred years old, and definitely less than a hundred thousand, and between that, god knows.

Over the years, however, a theory has emerged from this haphazard science, which suggests that Gearworld has seen the rise and fall of two great civilizations. The first actually built Gearworld, setting all those gigantic stone gears in motion, locking them together, pouring the concrete walls and excavating the rock. Why they built it, and what purpose it may have served, is an utter mystery, but obviously somebody put it there, and presumably at one time it did SOMETHING.

The second civilization, for some cryptic reason, rooted either in an alien psychology or a bizarre sense of surrealist art, came after the initial gear builders had departed, and took it apart. Gears which presumably once moved and had a function might be removed, shifted ten feet or a hundred miles, and hung neatly from the ceiling for no apparent reason. The end result was a concrete labryinth in which some things work and some things don't, and some bits appear logical, and some bits are anything but.

The notion that Gearworld might never have been built, but might have grown, like some kind of gigantic concrete refutation of the Blind Watchmaker argument, is generally ignored as being too damn weird and a little creepy.
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This painting almost doesn't work. I wanted to do it, I was still in a Gearworld mood, and though it took a long time and I doubt it'll be all that interesting to anybody else due to the lack of any figure, I'm still glad to have done it. But I suspect it may not work on the computer screen, where it is teeny. It needs to be large, and have a sense of mass. The jumbo prints (and I'll have the LE jumbos for $45, and the standard for $10, as usual) are a lot better, but it's possible that some day I may need to haul out the biggest hunk of clayboard I can dig up and do a version that covers most of the wall. Maybe that will give me the sense of scale I want. I dunno. It'll have to percolate for awhile.

The Latin motto on the largest gear--"Ita erat quando hic adveni" relates to the aforementioned story, and is partly as a reminder not to take even something as grim and somber as Gearworld all that seriously. I'll leave it to the viewer to actually track down the meaning for now. *grin*

Anyway! Digital, Painter 7, limited edition prints available, drop a line. (That may be enough concrete for awhile....)