"remember and honor the history, but live in the [steampunk] present"

December 20, 2016 9:44 AM

The Polish artist Jakub Rozalski, who goes by the sobriquet “Mr. Werewolf,” has produced an amusing series of steampunk-ish canvases in which serene and idyllic rustic landscapes of what seem to be Eastern Europe (Rozalski’s very back yard, you might say) in the early decades of the 20th century feature the prominent and inexplicable existence of completely fictitious giant mecha robots.

The art comes from a companion book to the board game Scythe.

posted by Etrigan (17 comments total)

Fuck, now I want a mail bear.
posted by Keith Talent at 9:58 AM on December 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

Wojtek would be artillery, surely.
posted by zamboni at 10:00 AM on December 20, 2016 [3 favorites]

Rozalski previously.
posted by zamboni at 10:08 AM on December 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

Reminds me of the '70s and '80s-looking work of Simon Stålenhag
posted by jalexei at 10:29 AM on December 20, 2016 [9 favorites]

...in which serene and idyllic rustic landscapes of what seem to be Eastern Europe (Rozalski’s very back yard, you might say) in the early decades of the 20th century feature the prominent existence of completely giant mecha robots.

FTFY. "Fictional" giant mecha robots need no further explanation.
posted by Celsius1414 at 10:44 AM on December 20, 2016

Wojtek would be artillery, surely.

Keep scrolling!
posted by Strange Interlude at 10:46 AM on December 20, 2016

I love the art, and I've played Scythe once (the art connoisseur edition). It has ... a lot of play elements, so it's doubtless unfair to give an overall judgment based on one game. What I can say is that I had anticipated it being a combat/conquest kind of game, and while that element of it probably can't be ignored, I was surprised by how much the game focused on cycling through resource buildups to improve things on the player/faction mats. It's one of the top-rated games at BoardGameGeek, but it didn't seem like my cup of tea.
posted by Wobbuffet at 10:49 AM on December 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

At the risk of being a pedant, I'd say this series was more Dieselpunk than Steampunk, though the line can be blurry.
posted by Grimp0teuthis at 11:23 AM on December 20, 2016 [4 favorites]

If you like this, you might also like the artwork of Simon Stålenhag who paints alternate-1980's suburban/rural landscapes in Sweden littered with wreckage and ruins of giant robots and alien machines or spacecraft.
posted by straight at 12:21 PM on December 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

At the risk of being a pedant, I'd say this series was more Dieselpunk than Steampunk, though the line can be blurry.

That's from the fumes.
posted by Celsius1414 at 12:48 PM on December 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

The Red Riding Hood one is brilliant.

The paintings on the whole brought to mine the work of Kittelsen, which is only praise,
posted by 256 at 1:51 PM on December 20, 2016

The difference between Rozalski and Stålenhag is, in a nutshell, the difference between Polish and Swedish history. Sweden had some two centuries of peace and a landmark social democracy that has since only been partly rolled back under neoliberalism; the result is nostalgia for a long warm summer of childhood under Socialism That Doesn't Suck, plus sci-fi paraphernalia. Poland's history, meanwhile, has been a whole lot darker (its location in the middle of the central European plain all but guaranteed that), with wars and patriotic struggles against terrible odds; and the last time Poland was free before 1918, it had been an agrarian feudal society with a militarised service aristocracy. (It had socialism as well, but that was imposed at gunpoint by the Soviets and generally is considered to have sucked.)
posted by acb at 2:41 PM on December 20, 2016 [4 favorites]

At the risk of being a pedant, I'd say this series was more Dieselpunk than Steampunk, though the line can be blurry.

Those clanking mechs look coal-powered to me. Either that or extremely poorly tuned.
posted by acb at 2:42 PM on December 20, 2016

I like these. Just last week I was googling to try and remember which of the Discworld books has Nazi werewolves hunting Vimes through Uberwald in it, which surprisingly led to finding Nazi werewolves were an actual thing. Well, an actual post-war aspiration, anyway.

Anyhow this one could almost be an illustration for a moment in The Fifth Elephant. Though the sensibility of the pictures is much more sinister and cynical and ambivalent and historically loaded than anything Pratchett ever wrote.
posted by glasseyes at 4:43 PM on December 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

These look to be digital - not "canvases" (not that it matters). Love the balance of painterly brushiness with fine detail.
posted by device55 at 8:45 PM on December 20, 2016

Grrr now that I am tempted by these cool pictures, I see the book has gone and sold out :-(
posted by Merlin The Happy Pig at 10:50 PM on December 20, 2016

As linked from his portfolio in the previous post, you can still buy prints.
posted by zamboni at 6:33 AM on December 22, 2016 [1 favorite]