Many artists use copyright-free images to produce their work, appropriating drawings and photographs from the past to induce a sense of nostalgia, for aesthetic reasons or conceptual purposes. One of the ways I get myself inspired to make something (today, a new book project) is to look through old illustrations. Scribner’s is a great journal to sift through and Archive.org has a lot of great stuff too. And then there’s Google Patents, which documents patents for things like infant head-cooling devices or the first eyelash curler…or the toupee above.

On some level, I think this is a digital repository for dreams, past and recent, which is why the space becomes so inspiring and interesting. The records contain the title “Inventor” on them and then a signature or several. You can kind of see the mind at work in these pages…like the merry-go-round above, created with the idea of a horse in mind. And then to think of how our perception and use of this mechanism has changed over time. Very lovely indeed.