C A M O U P E D I A: 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

Sunday, September 22, 2024

extraordinary dazzle-related artworks / Michael Miller