In WW1, US Navy painted complex patterns of geometric shapes on ships as
"Dazzle" camouflage had a short life, but an important one.
These are two British dazzle-camouflaged ships from World War I. At first glance they may appear to be two ...
With its origins on military warships, the distinctive aesthetic is now a favorite of designers and artists.
Monograph on Walter Tandy Murch (2021) Recently I became aware of the paintings of an extraordinary Canadian-born artist named Walter Tandy Murch (1907-1967). I am amazed to think that I had never heard of him before. I am drawn to his work in part because it has so much to do with styles and “ways of seeing” that I myself feel compatible with. His work has the seemingly effortless charm of collages and assemblages, in which familiar components are recognizable—up to a point—yet disarmingly strange and beclouded. His paintings are not collages of course. They are unforced yet purposeful patterns of paint. The mystery that they induce comes partly from the struggle between the clarity of the thing portrayed—a bowler hat, gears and scientific tools, the backside of a manikin—and a half-rhyming, impending surrounding that threatens to merge. But it doesn’t. Murch’s very finest works traverse a tight rope on the cusp of genuinely excellent gallery art (not easily found at the moment) and the best magazine illustration. Somehow he excelled at both, and we should not be surprised to find that his work remains formidable whether mounted on a gallery wall, or printed in full color on a magazine cover. Among his most powerful paintings are works that were commissioned as illustrations for the covers of Fortune Magazine and Scientific American. Walter Tandy Murch / Cover Illustration In researching Murch’s origins, I was more than pleased to find that he was student of Arthur Lismer (of the Canadian Group of Seven), one of my favorite painters, and one whose well-known works include a masterful depiction of the RMS Olympic, dressed in dazzle camouflage. As in Murch’s own paintings, Lismer is good at inviting us to participate in hide-and-seek. Murch moved from Canada in 1927 to New York, where he later studied with Arshile Gorky, another favorite artist of mine, who taught civilian camouflage during World War II. He was also greatly interested in the dream-like box collages of Joseph Cornell, of whom he painted a portrait in 1941. While he was always prolific, Murch was never widely known, perhaps in part because he dared to be a “fine artist” when exhibiting at the Betty Parsons Gallery, and yet to apply the very same skills in illustration, advertising, graphic design, restaurant murals, the design of department store windows, and teaching. He lived for only sixty years. In the year before he died, his work was exhibited in a major retrospective at the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2021, Rizzoli USA published a full-color book about his life and work, titled Walter Tandy Murch: Paintings and Drawings, 1925-1967. At the top of this post is the cover. Walter Tandy Murch / painting Those who are immersed in vision and art—whether fine art or design—are nearly always prone to be devotees of cinema. I certainly fall within that group. Among the films that I admire are The Conversation, The English Patient, Julia, The Godfather series, and many more. That said, as I was basking in the pleasure of having found the artist Walter Tandy Murch, imagine my further exhuberance when I also learned that Murch’s son is the celebrated filmmaker and sound designer Walter Scott Murch. Among his many remarkable films are the few that I have listed above, but there are many more of equal or greater distinction. RELATED LINKS Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work? Nature, Art, and Camouflage Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage Optical science meets visual art Disruption versus dazzle Chicanery and conspicuousness Under the big top at Sims' circus
2016.09.14
Unlike a submarine that can lurk beneath the waves, or an artillery tank that can camouflage itself among trees and the surrounding terrain,...
Dazzle Camouflage #1850 is our fabulous dazzle pattern printed as black over a solid white background. Simply paint the surface of you build as you would with any color for an undersurface and using Scale Motorsport's Decal-Magic BLACK Setting solution and your Dazzle Camouflage #1850 displaye that perfect camouflage body
1917 was wild, y'all. H/T 100YearsAgo
With its origins on military warships, the distinctive aesthetic is now a favorite of designers and artists.
Een bizarre camouflagetechniek uit de Eerste Wereldoorlog kan levens redden in Irak en Afghanistan.
These are two British dazzle-camouflaged ships from World War I. At first glance they may appear to be two ...
The Situation You’re the Fleet Admiral of the Navy in World War I. Your ships are being sunk at an alarming rate by the devastatingly effective German U-Boat. The traditional camoufla…
"Dazzle" camouflage had a short life, but an important one.
Dazzle camouflage, also known as razzle dazzle or dazzle painting, was a family of ship camouflage used extensively in World War I, and to a lesser extent in World War II and afterwards. Credited to the British marine artist Norman Wilkinson, though with a rejected prior claim by the zoologist John Graham Kerr, it consisted of complex patterns of geometric shapes in contrasting colors, interrupting and intersecting each other. Unlike other forms of camouflage, the intention of dazzle is not to conceal but to make it difficult to estimate a target's range, speed, and heading. Norman Wilkinson explained in 1919 that he had intended dazzle more to mislead the enemy about a ship's course and so to take up a poor firing position, than actually to cause the enemy to miss his shot when firing. Dazzle was adopted by the Admiralty in the UK, and then by the United States Navy, with little evaluation. Each ship's dazzle pattern was unique to avoid making classes of ships instantly recognizable to the enemy. The result was that a profusion of dazzle schemes was tried, and the evidence for their success was at best mixed. So many factors were involved that it was impossible to determine which were important, and whether any of the color schemes were effective. Dazzle attracted the notice of artists such as Picasso, who claimed that Cubists like himself had invented it. Edward Wadsworth, who supervised the camouflaging of over 2,000 ships during the First World War, painted a series of canvases of dazzle ships after the war, based on his wartime work. Arthur Lismer similarly painted a series of dazzle ship canvases. USS Mahomet (ID-3681) in port, circa November 1918. The ship has a "dazzle" camouflage scheme that distorts the appearance of her bow. CSS Atlanta, 1901. The first Atlanta was an iron-hulled, schooner-rigged, screw steamer in the Confederate Navy, later captured and served in the United States Navy. Narkeeta (Harbor Tug No.3) with an experimental "brickwork" camouflage scheme in 1917. Black stripes on the white background produced a soft gray effect at moderate distances. Larger black patches were applied to those areas which usually reflected light. Visibility of the ship was reduced when the light was behind the observer. HMS ADVENTURE in dazzle camouflage during World War I. Nebraska (BB14). Port bow, camouflaged, Norfolk, 04-20-1918. USS Nebraska in camouflage paint during World War I. RMS Mauretania, dazzle camouflage, c.1916. The transatlantic Olympic-class ocean liner RMS Olympic, the brother of the Titanic and Britannic (launched in 1910, used as a troopship between 1915 and 1919. Retired in 1935.) R.M.S. Empress of Russia, c.1915. USS Leviathan of New York City, 8 July 1918. USS Leviathan in camouflage, 1918. USS K-5 showing its stripes near Pensacola, FL in 1916. British Aubretia class sloop HMS Polyanthus, as a Q ship in World War I. HMS Rocksand, c.1918. HMS Argus in harbor, 1918. Aircraft carrier HMS Argus in 1918. S.S. Alloway, 1918. Aerial photograph of British minelayer HMS Adventure, February 1943. The U.S. heavy cruiser USS Northampton (CA-26) at Brisbane, Australia, 5 August 1941. Photograph of French cruiser FFS GLOIRE, in dazzle camouflage, with ship's company on deck saluting King George VI as he passed by in the anchorage at Naples, c.1944. HMAS Yarra in the Persian Gulf, August 1941. The German battleship Tirpitz in Bogen Bay in Ofotfjord, near Narvik, Norway, during World War II.
WOP: DAZZLE CAMOUFLAGE
Dazzle Camouflage #1850 is our fabulous dazzle pattern printed as black over a solid white background. Simply paint the surface of you build as you would with any color for an undersurface and using Scale Motorsport's Decal-Magic BLACK Setting solution and your Dazzle Camouflage #1850 displaye that perfect camouflage body
Burnell Poole, two views of HMS Mauretania (c1920) Above For a long time we have known about a wonderful painting by American artist Burnell Poole of the starboard side of the dazzle-camouflaged HMS Mauretania (top). But only recently did we learn that he also created a companion painting (bottom), which shows the port side of the same ship. It clearly shows its camouflage. When dazzle ship camouflage was initiated during World War I, it was decided that no ship should have the same camouflage pattern on both sides. The original paintings are housed in the collections of the Merseyside Maritime Museum, and the US Navy Art Collection, respectively. ••• The following is a brief excerpt from Roy R. Behrens' "Khaki to khaki (dust to dust): the ubiquity of camouflage in human experience" just published in Ann Elias, Ross Harley and Nicholas Tsoutas, eds, Camouflage Cultures: Beyond the Art of Disappearance (Sydney University Press, 2015). Among its other contributors are Donna West Brett, Paul Brock, Ann Elias, Ross Gibson, Amy Hamilton, Pamela Hansford, Jack Hasenpusch, Ian Howard, Husuan L. Hsu, Bernd Hüppauf, Ian McLean, Jacqueline Millner, Jonnie Morris, Brigitta Olubas, Nikos Papastergiadis, Tanya Peterson, Nicholas Tsoutas, Linda Tyler and Ben Wadham— How is it that we experience "things" in contrast to surrounding "stuff"?… Like you, I even see my "self" this way. "I am I" and, to follow, I am not "not-I." We typically regard our “selves” as permeable identities in a bouillabaisse of ubiquitous “stuff,” a surrounding that seems to a newborn, in the famous words of William James, like “a blooming, buzzing confusion.” One wonders if this might also explain, as Ernst Schachtel suggested, why we are all afflicted by “childhood amnesia,” leaving us with little or no memory of the first years of our lives, because we lacked the “handles” then—the linguistic categories—that enable us to “grasp” events. In recent years, increased attention has been paid to the various forms of “amnesia” at the opposite end of life, including gradual memory loss, senility, dementia, and the horrifying ordeal of Alzheimer’s. If the boundaries of our figural “self” are blurred when we are newborns, perhaps we should not be surprised that the limits of our “self” grow thin—once again—as we march to the end of existence. As adults, we use hackneyed phrases like “dust to dust” to imply that at birth we somehow spring from naught; that we metamorphically evolve through infancy and childhood; live out our ritualistic lives as corporeal upright adults; then slowly—or, just as often, catastrophically—“deconstruct”; and (at last) are literally “disembodied” in the process that we dread as death. Instead of saying “dust to dust,” it may be more in tune to say “khaki to khaki,” since it seems as if our lives consist of time-based re-enactments of a spectrum of nuanced relations between figure and ground, some or all of which pertain to varieties of camouflage. additional sources
Woodcut 'Camouflaged Ship in Dry Dock, 1918' (dazzle pattern) by Edward Wadsworth
It's difficult to hide from an enemy when you're inside an enormous ship, or part of a vast Naval fleet. And yet many ships in history have been well-camouflaged, despite a distinct lack of cloaking devices. Here are some of the most amazing examples.
Dazzle camouflage, also known as Razzle Dazzle or Dazzle painting, was a camouflage paint scheme used on ships, extensively during World War...
The Situation You’re the Fleet Admiral of the Navy in World War I. Your ships are being sunk at an alarming rate by the devastatingly effective German U-Boat. The traditional camoufla…
'Camouflaged ships in dry dock' or 'Dazzle Ships', Edward Wadsworth, woodcut, British, 1918. Proof on Japan paper, signed in pencil Edward Wadsworth, 1918.
"Dazzle camouflage was a painting used for warships in World War I, when radar technology did not exist. It made it difficult to identify a vessel as well as its heading and speed. The person in the room hides her face with sunglasses, repeats reception and transmission with a smartphone in her
" A Convoy " ... A painting of ships with "Dazzle" camouflage [1918] by Artist: Herbert Barnard John Everett
MARPAT US Woodland camo pattern It’s uncanny, the similarities between birthing babies and books. No sooner do you pop out the first one, folks start eagerly chatting you up about #2. While the jury remains out on sibling-making for our son, I’m at least equipped with an answer for what I’ll tackle for book #2: a popular history of classic graphic patterns like polka dots, stripes, fleur de lis and camouflage. Nothing will teach you faster if a topic can sustain your attentio
