extraordinary dazzle-related artworks / Michael Miller

Michael Miller, Counterintelligence

Beginning with World War I and the adoption of abstract disruptive patterns for ship camouflage (called dazzle camouflage), it has been commonly assumed that these may have been influenced by Modernists, such as Cubists, Futurists and Vorticists. While there is some measure of truth in that, such patterns were nearly always designed by artists whose pre-war studio work was academic, pictorial, or, at best, impressionistic. It might make more sense to suppose that dazzle patterns were a great post-war influence on abstract art, instead of the inverse direction. By now, more than a century after WWI, that continues to be true, perhaps even more so.

Patterns that may remind us of close-up detailed segments of dazzle ship camouflage are everywhere, so it's a challenge to allude to those, without seeming to be cliché. Only recently have I run across the work of a contemporary Scottish artist whose paintings pays genuine homage to WWI ship camouflage, while also maintaining a freshness. His name is Michael Miller and his artwork can be viewed online at his website. Two of them are posted here. He is undoubtedly well aware of the indebtedness of his work to ship camouflage, and indeed, in 2014, he was a visiting artist at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. 

It is of additional interest that he was born in Glasgow, because it was a prominent Scottish zoologist, Sir John Graham Kerr, who was most likely the first to propose the use of disruptive patterns (if not dazzle, technically) for ship camouflage, as I have talked about elsewhere.

As a person who has extensively studied and written about disruptive patterns, in wartime as well as in natural forms, and as one who tried (for 46 years) to teach students "to see" while producing paintings or graphic design, I find much to admire in Miller's work. In viewing the two paintings of his that are reproduced here, I am reminded of a passage by a British zoologist, Sir Alister Hardy (who was also an artist, and served as an army camoufleur during WWI). Here is an astonishing excerpt from The Living Stream: A Restatement of Evolution Theory and its Relationship to the Spirit of Man. New York: Harper and Row, 1965—

I think it likely that there are no finer galleries of abstract art than the cabinet drawers of the tropical butterfly collector. Each “work” is a symbol, if I must not say of emotion, then of vivid life…It is often, I believe, the fascination of this abstract color and design, as much as an interest in biology or a love of nature, that allures the ardent lepidopterist, although all these may be combined; he has his favorite genera and dotes upon his different species of Vanessa and Parnassius, as the modernist does upon his examples of Matisse or Ben Nicholson. The one-time schoolboy collector will in later life be transfixed with emotion for a moment at the sight of a Camberwell Beauty or a swallowtail—I speak from experience.

Michael Miller, Hippocampus

 

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

a scenery painter and shipbuilder turns to camouflage

Above This photograph was taken during a 1918 Fourth of July parade down Fifth Avenue in New York City. It shows wartime shipbuilders walking beside a float on which has been mounted a scale model of a dazzle-camouflaged ship. The Scottish-born camoufleur in the news story below may have worked for a comparable shipbuilding plant. Digital coloring.

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SEEKS REVENGE IN ARMY: Scot Glad to Fight Germans Who Killed Sister and Brothers, in New York Times, October 16, 1917, p 9—

Drilling with Company B of the 302nd Engineers, not with the light-hearted enthusiasm of the rest of the recruits but with the determInation of a man who sees his day for vengeance approaching, is James Kelly, whose sister and two brothers were killed by the Germans.

Kelly was born In Glasgow, Scotland. He came to this country eight years ago, and found employment in New York as a scenery painter. He made yearly trips to visit his family in Glasgow. He tried to enlist, but was rejected because of tobacco heart [ailment related to smoking]. He returned to this country and entered a shipbuilding plant as a camouflage painter for patrol boats for the British navy.

A year and a half ago Kelly heard that his brother Kenneth had been wounded and captured by the Germans. When questioned by a Prussian intelligence officer, Kenneth Kelly refused to divulge important military information he possessed, and was put in prison. Later he was shot.

On receipt of this news James Kelly sailed for Scotland. He tried again to enlist, and again he was rejected because of his heart. Kelly then returned to camouflage British patrol boats being built in this country.

Ten months ago Kelly again visited Glasgow. This time news came that his brother John had been killed by a German shell. James Kelly for the third time tried to enter the service, but his tobacco heart was against him.

The United States had entered the war when Kelly returned to New York. He tried to enlist in the regular army without success, and then went back to his camouflage work. When he registered for the draft he refused to claim an exemption as an alien, and declared that he had two reasons for wanting to fight. His happiest day came when he was called by his local draft board to Camp Upton. Because of his expert knowledge of camouflage, he was assigned to the 302nd Engineers.

A letter from Glasgow this morning brought the news that three weeks ago his sister Angelina, a Red Cross nurse, was killed in France. Tonight Private James Kelly has three reasons why his wartime service should not be the cunning of camouflage but the steel of trench knife and bayonet.

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