british dazzle plane is mostly black and jazzy yellow

DAZZLE PLANE IS ENGLAND’S LATEST in Times Daily, March 3, 1925—

LONDON, England (UP)—Airplanes “like flying zebras” have joined the British air navy.

Officially, they are known as “dazzle planes.” They [are] splashed with color in an extension of camouflage so that even a short distance away, while in flight, it is impossible to tell what kind of machine it is.

Tests with several of these airplanes were made at one of the Royal Air Force stations.

Witnesses said that the “dazzle planes” seemed “all out of proportion,” with the fuselage in some places apparently badly bent. It looked, said one, as if the wings were about to fall off.

The colors chosen were mostly black and also jazzy yellow.

•••

Image credit: Animated version of print from David Versluis and Roy R. Behrens, Iowa Insect Series (2012)

snake-like sinuous piping / Mark Booth camouflage art

Tgrit © Mark Booth 2016

Recently I ran across the artwork of an Australian artist named Mark Booth. In 2021, he completed the research requirements for a Master of Fine Arts degree at The University of New South Wales. His thesis, titled Sculpture as Artifice: Mimetic Form in the Environment, can be found at his website along with detailed images of related projects.

Among the works you’ll find online is the one reproduced above, a sculpture titled Tigrit (2016). It was made from PVC pipe (commonly used for plumbing) which was covered with a camouflage-patterned vinyl wrap, then mounted on a wall, on a background that consists of a flat version of the same disruption scheme.

In his thesis, Booth refers to this and comparable works as “snake-like sinuous piping.” Many of us—presumably most—have a degree of aversion to snakes, and yet they are also astonishing, in part because their complicated patterns interfere effectively with the challenge of tracking their movements.

When I saw this initially, I thought of online images of a venomous gaboon viper reclining on a forest floor in sub-Saharan Africa. I wouldn’t like to step on that. Or, in the ranks of the nonvenomous, one cannot help but be impressed by the bewildering surface designs on ball pythons (called that because, when threatened, they coil up into a tight ball for protection).

But there are other things that also quickly spring to mind when confrontlng Mark Booth’s sculpture. After all, PVC is plumbing pipe, so it hardly surprising to think of the large intestines or the bowels. At that point scatology raises its head, and who knows where that path might lead.

This work also caught my eye because a few years ago, while making a series of digital montages, I inavertently ended up with Wind Instrument (reproduced below), that was probably inspired by the vagaries of bathroom jokes. Alimentary, my dear Watson.

For a closer look at Mark Booth’s work, visit his Instagram account. There is also online a selection of short, informative videos here.

In the meantime, given that this item originates from Australia, perhaps it would be fitting to mention Tasmania, the famed Australian island state. Here is an newspaper clipping, titled "Artists and Camouflage," as published in the Advocate (Burnie, Tasmania), on July 21, 1937—

“The problem of camouflage in war can only be solved with your help,” said Air Chief Marshall Sir Cyril Newall in addressing the painters at the Royal Academy banquet. “It is notable, however, that it is the academic and orthodox artist who is helping. At first glance we should have expected more help from the unorthodox—the surrealists, super-modernists, post-post-impressionists, post-mortem impressionists, or whatever you call them. These artists appear to me, as a layman, to misrepresent rather than represent the subjects they work upon.” 

Wind Instrument © Roy R. Behrens 2022

 

Gerome Brush and his memorial to Edward Thaw Jr.

Kasebier portrait of Evelyn Nesbit (1903)

Above Portrait of actress Evelyn Nesbit, made by Gertrude Kasebier (c1903), at about the time when she was allegedly seduced at Stanford White's New York architectural studio, an event that was later a factor in the shooting of White by Harry K. Thaw.

•••

Susan Wilson, Garden of Memories: A guide to historic Forest Hills. Boston: Forest Hills Educational Trust, 1998—

As you ascend [Milton Hill at Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston], you’ll see on the left one of the cemetery’s most unsual portrait sculptures. A winged, iron-clad archangel Michael stands by a beautiful young man, resting one hand on the youth’s shoulder, and another on a sword. The monument commemorates aviator Edward Thaw Jr (1908-1934) of Milton, who crashed in the mountains of New Mexico, while piloting a private plane from Quincy to San Diego.

Edward was the nephew of Harry K. Thaw, the millionaire who murdered handsome society architect Stanford White on the roof of Madison Square Garden in 1906. White’s crime was his tempestuous affair with showgirl Evelyn Nesbitt—his “Girl on the Red Velvet Swing”—prior to her marriage to Thaw. Thaw was aquitted on grounds of insanity.

Nephew Edward’s memorial at Forest Hills, commissioned by his mother, Jane Thaw, was sculpted by Gerome Brush. Son of well-known painter George DeForest Brush [and early aviator and airplane camoufleur Mittie Taylor Brush], Gerome studied art as a child in Europe [he was named in honor of French Academy painter, Jean-Leon Gerome, his father’s teacher], and was apprenticed to a Florentine marble carver. Upon returning to America, he worked on the World War I military [ship] camouflage program, and became a respected portraitist and painter, as well as an architectural and memorial sculptor.

•••

Below Roy R. Behrens, Death Announced, digital montage (2021), in which various vintage public domain graphic components have been altered and recombined. In the center background is a digitally-colored photograph of an enshrouded Evelyn Nesbit, being steadied by an assistant, as she appears in public for the first time after the death of Stanford White.

Digital montage © Roy R. Behrens 2021

camouflage / a dance of beatings the boy endured

Above Roy R. Behrens, Papa's Waltz (© 2021). Digital montage.

•••

Yesterday, I put up this blog post and montage (above) on The Poetry of Sight, my more generic blog about vision, design, and the creative process. But it occurs to me that it might also be appropriate to repost it here, since Theodore Roethke's language has everything to do with camouflage, with concealed and embedded components.

•••

The title of the montage reproduced above (I sometimes call them “visual poems”) is intended as an homage to what some people regard as Theodore Roethke’s finest work, a sixteen-line autobiographical poem, titled “My Papa’s Waltz” (c1942). It is beautifully constructed, filled with engagement and gesture—and is yet at the same time disturbing in its beneath-the-surface suggestions.

Roethke, as a poet should, makes apt use of figures of speech, and we (the readers) are left to decide what to make of it. Does “papa’s waltz” simply describe an innocent dance, in which an inebriated father is engaged in ritualistic fun with his son, a small boy. Or, as certain components suggest, is it not a literal waltz, but instead a frightening memory of dance-like beatings the boy endured at the hands of a drunken parent?

You must read the entire poem, which is available online at the website of the Poetry Foundation. At the same, it also helps to read the article about this poem on Wikipedia, and to learn about the life of Theodore Roethke.