who cut off your tie at the Art Academy of Cincinnati?

Batchelor and Behrens / Art Academy of Cincinnati

In the late 1980s, I was living in Cincinnati OH, where I was head of the graphic design program at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. It was an interesting place at the time, the school as well as the city, and I have enduring memories of wonderful students and colleagues. After more than thirty years, I am still in contact with some of them.

Among my favorite colleagues from those days was a British-born printmaker named Anthony (Tony) Batchelor, who died a few months ago. The two of us, given the right circumstances, were prone to bursting out with Pythonesque sillyness. I still have a photograph (shown here) of Tony and myself at one of those spontaneous moments.

In 1981, I had published a book called Art and Camouflage: Concealment and Deception in Nature, Art and War. It did not sell particularly well, but it received sufficient attention (as from the Whole Earth Catalog, for example) that it acheived some small notoreity as one of the early books about the role that artists played in the study of camouflage, both in nature and in war. 

Various things happened as a result: In 1988, soon after I joined the faculty at AAC, the school succeeded in obtaining a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to host a community-wide series of activities (talks, exhibits, and other events) on the theme of art and camouflage. 

That same year I was contacted by British documentary filmmakers who were in process of making a film on the same subject, to air on television in both the US and the UK. The UK version was titled The Art of Deception, and appeared as a segment of Equinox on BBC televison (the name Cincinnati was misspelled). The American version, titled Disguises of War, was broadcast as part of NOVA on American Public Television, by way of WGBH Boston. That version can still be viewed online. 

Roy Behrens as interviewed on NOVA (1990)

 

A still frame from that program is reproduced here. It was filmed on an exceedingly hot afternoon on the grounds of the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton OH. It was nearly impossible to complete the filming because (being an air force base) airplanes were constantly taking off. I was wearing a purple shirt and an especially appropriate necktie, the top half of which was a contrasting color, while the bottom half was the very same color as the shirt. 

When it aired nationally, I recall that my mother comically asked, “Who cut off your tie?” Another funny consequence is that the next day after its national broadcast, I received phone calls at the AAC, from former students in Wisconsin and Iowa, saying that they had watched the program, not knowing that I was included. One person told me that, “as the program started, I said to myself, ‘This is something that Roy Behrens would really enjoy”—and then, suddenly, I appeared on screen. Believe me, I no longer look like this.

PRINT magazine article on camouflage

Around the same time I received a call from the managing editor at PRINT in New York, the leading graphic design newstand magazine in the US. Would I be willing to prepare a major article on camouflage in relation to art and design? The resulting article was called Blend and Dazzle: The Art of Camouflage (January / February 1991). In no time, that then led to being appointed a Contributing Editor at PRINT, which I enjoyed tremendously for at least a dozen years or more.

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