I was already fascinated with Larry Niven's free-fall environment, and then in this book I was especially taken with his descriptions of life in and around the “Clump.”
The Clump is a LaGrange point within the Smoke Ring where curious matter of all types has collected; in the deepest part of the interior, it is flowing "soup," an area the inhabitants call the “Dark.”
Given the already strange ecology of the Smoke Ring proper, the addition of organisms peculiar to the Clump made for an intriguing proposition irresistible to an illustrator.
The Clump flows into our field of vision from the lower left corner. Spherical green puffball plants and “jungles” provide shelter for some inhabitants of the region, while (from the painter's angle) providing an essential reference to the Earthbound viewer for spatial distance and perspective.
Strange life forms, the peculiar geometric “huts” of the human inhabitants of the region, ponds, clouds, and other strange objects float around like shapes in a Miro painting. In fact, there is so much going on in there that I was concerned that the human activity on the right would clutter things up too much!
Unlike my painting for the cover of The Integral Trees, this one encompasses both suns within its field of view though they are somewhat obscured by haze or Clump material.
Additional images from THE SMOKE RING
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There's some confusion on the date for this one. The paperback came out in 1988, but the hardcover released the year prior in '87. There's no date on my transparencies either so I had to do a little digging to figure it out.
The confusion stems from when the painting sold. I applied a protective coat of varnish on top which failed miserably. I ended up having to apply multiple coats of additional varnish to even out the flat surface. I had to wet sand it down to just a micron above the actual paint itself. It took days and days of fraught labor trying to fix the damn thing.
It was such a drag and a nuisance. It robbed days out of my schedule I didn’t have to spare.
I don’t recall the exact timing, but I suspect (as was usual back then) the publisher hung onto the artwork for at least 6 months (until the book came out) then maybe some time afterwards before it was returned to me.
Then if we took it to conventions, it might have been ‘88 when I was preparing it. I may have had the transparencies shot then, in ‘88, which may explain why all the films have an ‘88 sticker on them.
That’s my best guess anyway. 😉
But it doesn’t explain why there’s no signature though. I’m hopeless. I hope like hell I signed it before sending it!
Anyway, according to our files I received payment for the cover art for The Smoke Ring in September 1986, so it was painted in that year.