the machines are alive - help me find these illustrations
June 19, 2009 5:47 AM   Subscribe

I'm trying to find the work of an artist or illustrator that I glimpsed on the web and then forgot. Black and white illustrations show interior of an imagined factory where the machines had a mix of art-deco industrial whimsical human faces and features. For example: Ingots of steel have faces, and squat arms and legs.

Within the past two years I came across a blog post with some lovely illustrations that seemed to be from the fist half of the 21st century: 1900-1950 I'd guess.

One that sticks in my mind is an anthropomorphized wire-drawing machine: a row of human-like faces that are output nozzles of the machine. Each face is extruding a coil of wire from it's pointed mouth, like sucking a strand of spaghetti in reverse.

Rather than being strange or intimidating in a H.R. Geiger way, I remember a funny or pathetic feeling about the faces in the machines.

The style was either ink or illustration, black and white, with either pointillism or an engraved hash-mark technique for defining light and dark.

It might have been posted on boing boing as a "yay steampunk" example, but both general and site-specific Google searches have led me nowhere.
posted by sol to Media & Arts (3 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Could it perhaps be Boris Artzybasheff ?
posted by alchemist at 6:09 AM on June 19, 2009


Best answer: Google link to BoingBoing archive here
posted by alchemist at 6:10 AM on June 19, 2009


I have a (colorized) poster of this one. Had no idea who the artist was.
posted by kindall at 10:26 AM on June 19, 2009


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