camouflage / gestalt / design / taoism / bauhaus

watch free online here

philosopher Monroe Beardsley / cubistic camouflage

decanter and goblet / Monroe Beardsley

Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism. NY: Harcourt Brace and World, 1958, pp. 95-96—

A line that turns upon itself so that its ends are fused, and is therefore endless, defines a figure, or what is often called a form. It may be a continuous, unbroken, line-area— that is, an outline— or a circular row of dots, or a group of sketchy line-areas that fuse into a broken line and make a triangle, a pitcher-shape, or an elephant-shape. Consider, for a moment, a square, each of whose sides is a line-area. It does not matter much whether you call this outline a single line, or say that it consists of four lines, one for each side. If we speak in the latter way, we shall want to say that when two lines—as any two sides—fuse together in such a way that they both become parts of a single figure, then they “go with” each other. Line X goes with line Y when they are parts of the same figure.

To explore this concept a little further, we may consider the multiple relevance of lines—a phenomenon much exploited in modern nonrepresentational painting, but one that also throws light upon principles that have always been important in painting. Suppose we draw a large goblet bulging at the top, and a small decanter bulging at the bottom, in such a way that the same line-area serves as the right-hand side of the goblet and as the left-hand side of the decanter. This line belongs to two distinct figures at the same time, or, in other words, goes with two distinct sets of lines. It binds the two figures in a particularly intimate way, by guiding the eye from any point on the outline of either figure continuously to any point on the outline of the other. It is interesting to distinguish varying degrees of intimacy in the connection between two figures, depending upon the connections of their outlines. (1) The figures may be entirely separated as in Italian primitive painting. (2) There may be a broken line that goes from one to another, as in a painting by Rubens or El Greco, where the line of one figure’s leg or back will be picked up by the arm or side of another figure. (3) The same line may belong to both figures, as in the decanter-goblet example, or in paintings by Ozenfant, Gris, Braque, or Picasso in one period—see his Seated Woman (1927)…. (4) There may be strong lines that cut across both figures, throwing their actual outlines into the background, so that in fact the figures are actually submerged and tend to lose their character as figures. This is the principle of camouflage.

related observation by Gestaltist Fritz Heider

 

 

 

unheralded accomplishments of Walter Tandy Murch

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

lamb[l]ast / a lone wolf in snow-covered surroundings

WWII Finnish troops in snow-covered surrounding

There is a wartime Boston news report (December 1944) which features an American artist named Nathaniel J[udah] Jacobson (1916-1996), who was a US Army camoufleur. Originally from Boston, he had studied painting at the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, MIT, and at Yale University, where he earned a BFA degree in 1941.

When the US entered World War II at the end of 1941, Jacobson enlisted. In 1944, while stationed in Europe, he was a contributor to the development of white cape coverings for infantry in snow-covered surroundings on the border of Belgium and Germany.

His involvement in all this was reported in the Boston Globe on December 14, 1944, in an article with the headline BOSTON ARTIST AIDS IN SAVING GIS BY SLICK CAMOUFLAGE WORK (pp. 1-2), in which Jacobson is described as being the “boss of fifty Belgian girls as a factory supervisor in a First Army camouflage unit.”

While encamped in the Hurtgen Forest, the American infantry was unprepared for the sudden first snowfall, which left them “unduly exposed to enemy fire against the white background…” As a result, "camouflage engineers were called and given seven days to produce. It meant seven days in which to design, obtain materials, obtain labor and manufacture concealing [white] snow capes for all frontline troops.” Within 24 hours, a factory had been set up, laborers had been hired, and thread and muslin were flown in. “Within 36 hours the first snow cape was rattled off the production line.”

As for Private Jacobson, his “part of the job was training the help, mostly Belgian girls, ironing out the production bottlenecks, and [in] general speeding up” the process. “He did this job with such good effect that by the end of the fifth day—two days ahead of schedule—the much-needed capes were on their way to the boys whose lives depended on them.”

…”Factory jobs are curiously incongruous for many of the men of this battalion, which comprises in addition to the Boston artist [Jacobsen], landscape artisans, cameramen, advertising layout men and former movie directors. Incidently, they camouflaged [the insulated clothing of this correspondent (reporter Iris Carpenter)] against pneumonia—she hopes—a sheepskin coat which they have spotched brown and olive on the skin side. If snow falls she will wear the wool side out and risk observation by nothing more dangerous than the GIs.“

•••

One week after that article was published, a second news report (written by Hal Boyle) appeared in the Times-Mirror (Warren PA), in which Private First Class Jacobson (apparently newly promoted) is described as “discontented” with his job, and is quoted very candidly. According to him, “I got this job—which I don’t like—because I had picked up some French out of a phrase book and was able to tell the girls what we wanted done.”

“I never even worked in a clothing factory before—never wanted to,” he adds. “…And here I am running one. You sure do strange things in the Army.”

The young Belgian women he supervises, he continued, “…are just like American girls. They never stop talking. And the way they spend their money! One girls just paid 900 francs for a pair of shoes—three weeks salary for one pair of shoes!

They have been going to some American army dances. That’s what they talk about most all day long. They are envious of American girls because they heard American girls could go to dances alone. Here, even if she is 25 years old, a girl can’t go to a dance unless her parents come along, too.”

Looking “moodily” at “the happy humming girls” in his workforce, Jacobson explains: “I am a happily married man—this is no place for me. They should put a single man on this job. But I guess that’s why they put me here—because I am an old married man—and not a wolf.”

In contrast, his asistant and co-worker, Private Donavan Mccomber from Radcliff OH, glanced over the factory workroom, whistled cheerfully, and said:

“Well, so we got to work in a roomful of girls. It ain’t so bad. I can think of a lot worse ways to win the war.”

•••

Following the war, Jacobson returned to the Boston area, became a research associate at MIT, and embarked on long-term art-and-science color research, including responses to color, and computer modeling. He continued to paint and exhibit, and, in 1975, published a book on color, titled The Sense of Color: A Portfolio in Visuals (Van Nostrand Reinhold).

the organizing principles that underlie all camouflage

Above and below Still excerpts from Art, Design and Gestalt Theory: the film version (2023), a film about the perceptual organizing principles that are fundamental to human vision, including camouflage.

Art, Design and Gestalt Theory: The New Film Version

Recently completed: Our most popular video talk, titled Art, Design and Gestalt Theory: The Film Version (40 mins). It traces the emergence of Gestalt psychology (c1910), as well as its connections to holism, Taoism, yin and yang, displacements of attention, contrast illusions, color, camouflage, graphic design, and architecture. Ideal for classroom screenings, and library discussion events. Non-monetized, free full online access for anyone at YouTube.

is crime not to be depended upon / who can we trust?

Above A pictorial advertisement for a Victorian-era British illusionist, T[homas] Elder Hearn.

•••

Alas! This is An Age of Ingenious Camouflage, in Salina Journal (Salina KS), January 17, 1920—

New York—This is an age of camouflage. Yes; of course the word has been overworked. Maybe it isn't used any more in our best journalistic circles. But it's an age of camouflage just the same. Now take the case of John Smith of the East end, up for examination in a case of assault and battery. He did not deny that Emil Emilson hired him to beat up Joe Lansky or that he got $5 from Emil for beating up Joe. But he strongly denied that he did beat up Joe. Finally they got the truth out of John, who thus explained the seeming inconsistencies of his statement:

“When a fellow is hired to do up another guy he goes and tells him about it. Then they get together and they stick court plaster all over the guy's face and tie a bandage around his head with a little beef blood showing through and put his arm in a sling. The guy who wants him done up looks him over and thinks he got his money's worth.”

Now this is art, but is it honest? Is crime not to be depended upon to be what it seems? We know that our leather chairs are not made of hide, but of old rubber boots and condensed milk. We know that chicken salad is frequently made of veal. We understand that our sealskin coats are made from the fur of the muskrat and that our linen is cotton. Knowing, nobody cares. But it had been supposed that crime was above substitution. Here we have a detailed description of camouflage assault.

When thugs become too ingenious to kick in the ribs of the persons they are paid to assault and resort to camouflage to make the patron think he is getting something just as good, whither are we drifting? 

cut-out silhouettes of skunks / embedded figures

Cut-out silhouettes of skunks

Above In a recently posted video on Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage (2021) I demonstrate the use of cut-out silhouettes by American artist and naturalist Abbott H. Thayer, who worked in collaboration with his son, Gerald H. Thayer, in the study of protective coloration in nature. 

[During World War I] Thayer objected to the use of field service uniforms of plain, one-color fabric. He thought it was better to break it up, to counter the shading from overhead light, and to generally make it confusing.

At some point, he announced that he had come up with a simple method by which any soldier, in any setting, could determine his own best camouflage pattern. This too made use of cut-out silhouettes. All a soldier needed to do, Thayer proposed, is to cut out a silhouette of his own figure (or the generic shape of a man), and to study the colors and patterns that appeared in the hole of the figure when observed in his surroundings. He had already explored this photographically to recreate the patterns of, for example, birds and skunks [as shown above]…more>>>

• Nature, Art, and Camouflage (35 min. video talk) at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLX5YQF-H3k>

• Art, Women’s Rights, and Camouflage (29 min. video talk) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiSWNYCNRcM>

• Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage (26 min. video talk) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3asynn24nD4>

• Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage (28 min. video talk) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nS2ZwYyxy1Y>

Poet William Carlos Williams meets Gerald H. Thayer

Above Gerald H. Thayer, Male ruffed grouse in the forest (1907-08). Watercolor on paper. 19.75 inches high x 20 inches wide. First published as an illustration in his book, Concealing coloration in the animal kingdom, New York: Macmillan, 1909. Plate II, 38 (public domain). The original painting is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Roy R. Behrens, “Khaki to khaki (dust to dust): the ubiquity of camouflage in human experience” in Ann Elias, Ross Hartley and Nicholas Tsoutas, eds., Camouflage Cultures: Beyond the art of disappearance. AU: Sydney University Press, 2015—

The grouse [in Thayer’s painting] is completely motionless (a common means of defence among animals) for the same reason that the Ames distorted room [one of the Ames Demonstrations in psychology] works best from a rigid, “frozen” one-eyed view. Motion is a great spoiler of camouflage, and if the grouse moves even a muscle, it will be quickly given away.…

•••

Halter Peter, The revolution in the visual arts and the poetry of William Carlos Williams. Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 125-126—

[From an analysis of a William Carlos Williams poem]…the last lines [of the poem]—“a / partridge / from dry leaves”—contain a reference to the painting Male Ruffed Grouse in the Forest by Gerald H. Thayer…Thayer’s watercolor of a partridge merging with dry leaves and winter trees behind it is related to the Audubon tradition of accurate and loving observation of the American fauna which Wlliams so highly valued…

Moreover, Thayer’s painting is a kind of picture puzzle: Based on the systematic exploration of mimicry in animals, it depicts a partridge that is indeed difficult tell “from dry leaves.’…Williams may well have singled out Thayer’s painting as a work of art that, not unlike his own poem, explores ambiguty and foregrounds the problem of figure and ground. Both painting and poem are about what has to be “figured out”; both contain, in other words, the hide-and-seek dimension that asks for the viewer’s or reader’s active participation.

VIDEO LINKS

Nature, Art, and Camouflage  

Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage

 Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage

 Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage

concealed as snow, as a tree stump or a bale of hay

WWI US soldier positioned on tree stump (c1918)

Oliver Herford, quoted by Constance Murray Greene in HUSH, BLUSH AND PLUSH IN NEW BOOKS OF POEMS, The New York Sun, 19 January 1919, p. 11—

If you can stand upon one spot
And look like something you are not
And wouldn’t if you could be—say
A bean bag or a bale of hay—
You’ll find it quite a useful stunt
To practice on the Western Front:
This picture shows how Private Dunne,
Disguised as snow, deceived the Hun.
Who could not possibly see through
The camouflage; no more can you!”

Oliver Herford, An Alphabet of Celebrities

 

As human folly brings about yet another catastrophe

Above Cover of Ballast Quarterly Review. Vol 8 No 1 (Autumn 1992), featuring a wood engraving by British printmaker Robert Gibbings, titled Fowey Habor (c1919).  All issues of Ballast (a periodical commonplace book that ran for twenty-one years) are now available online as pdf downloads.

•••

Robert Gibbings, Sweet Thames Run Softly. NYC: E.P. Dutton, 1945—

The war [WWII] broke out, but I was overage. Besides, I had met a bullet in the last war. I tried for camouflage. I offered to make drawings from submarines, having already worked underwater in a diving helmet…if it was human folly which had brought about the catastrophe, it was, for the most part, only human beings who were paying the price. The world of nature was unaffected; flowers still bloomed, birds still sang, even butterflies continued their migrations, and rivers flowed towards the sea.

Frank Lloyd Wright | Taliesin West and Camouflage

Mason City poster © Roy R. Behrens

In the following text, the newspaper article referenced is “Architect Wright’s Arizona Home, Last Word in Camouflage, Blends into Landscape of Desert” in The Sacramento Bee (Sacramento CA), May 14, 1940.

In 1911. the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright established a studio near Spring Green, Wisconsin, on a property that had long been owned by his maternal Welsh ancestors, the Lloyd Jones family. He referred to that location as Taliesin, which is Welsh for “shining brow.”

Beginning in 1935, Wright no longer remained in Wisconsin year-round. Instead, he and his students traveled annually to the Southwest, to spend each winter in more compatible weather in a desert setting, twenty-six miles from Phoenix, Arizona. The complex he established there became known as Taliesin West.

In May of 1940, a newspaper article described Wright’s Taliesin West (still unfinished at the time) as the “last word in camouflage.” World War Two was underway (although the US was officially neutral), and the article recommended that “the artists of wartime camouflage could learn a lot from the sprawling, unusual structure” that Wright was then developing in Paradise Valley, near Scottsdale AZ.

Although Wright himself might not refer to his architecture as camouflage, the article goes on to say, it is nothing short of that, since “the building blends so completely with the desert landscape that it is scarcely visible a half-mile away.” Indeed, “were it not for the white canvas roof it would almost be lost in the rugged mountain topography at a distance.”

Proposed book cover (2016) not used

Cedar Rock talk about Wright and Modern-era furniture (2018)

Jasper | dappled dog with white chicken on backside

Above A vintage news photograph of a dog that appears to have the shape of a white chicken on its backside.

•••

A Conscientious Objector in The Ogden Standard (Ogden UT), September 7, 1918, p. 23—

The art of camouflage was resorted to in one instance in making a scene for [a motion picture titled] Young America… Jasper, the pet dog of the leading boy character, refuses to chase chickens. He was brought up among chickens and carefully trained from puppyhood not to molest them. When he was “ordered” to do this in the [filming], he positively refused.

It was necessary to get another dog [to use as a stand-in] for Jasper, and, while a canine was found of the same size and approximate type, it did not have the correct spotting. The double was turned over to the scenic artist.

Hollywood camoufleur | Shotgun wedding in reverse

Poster for Tummell's award-winning film (1933)

William F. Tummell (1892-1977) was an award-winning Hollywood film director, who served as a camouflage artist during World War I.

Born in Kansas City MO, he grew up there, and in Muskogee OK. He attended Muskogee Central High School, where one of his classmates was Viola Kobler. Around 1913, they eloped and were married without her parents’ consent in Wagoner OK.

When they returned to Muskogee, they were confronted by the bride’s father, who “took the bride home with him and made her stay there and warned the youthful husband away with a shotgun.” Following unsuccessful “attempts at reconciliation,” the parents sent their daughter to Iowa.

In the fall of 1913, unable to locate the bride, Tummell filed a lawsuit in Superior Court for $20,000 in damages against her parents. When he learned her whereabouts, he “went after her and finally brought her home with him.” The following year, Tummell (apparently without his wife) moved to Los Angeles to work as a technical director for film companies. Whatever the circumstances, their marriage ended in divorce in 1917.

Earlier, while living in Missouri, Tummell had been a member of the Missouri National Guard. In 1917, he joined Company F of the 24th Engineers, an army camouflage unit. He passed through Kansas City on November 27, on his way to training at Camp American University in Washington DC. According to an article in the Muskogee Times-Democrat on the following day—

The company will be composed entirely of men recruited from the motion picture industry and its business will be to render [American] batteries, billets and other war instruments invisible to [enemy eyes]. After three months of intensive training in Washington [DC] the movie fighters will embark for the war zone.

Following the war, Tummell returned to his film career in Hollywood. Between 1925 and 1977, he contributed to 59 films. In 1933, he received an Academy Award as Best Assistant Director for his work on Cavalcade. He died in Los Angeles in 1977 at age 85.

While looking for information about William Tummell, we discovered that the US Army photograph that we used on the cover (below) of False Colors: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage (2002) is that of a camouflaged soldier from Tummell's unit, Company F of the 24th Engineers, taken at Camp American University in November 1917.

Can you find the big gun embedded in this picture?

Above An embedded figure puzzle from The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. August 18, 1918.

Cave Canem | How To Camouflage Your Dog

How to camouflage your dog

Artist unknown. Catchpenny print, 18th century "puzzle picture" titled The Isle of Dogs.

•••

Anon, THE MAGIC OF CAMOUFLAGE in Edmonton Journal (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada), September 19, 1918, p. 6—

An American artist has discovered a new use of camouflage. He has a favorite dog which his neighbors have been kicking out of their way whenever the animal chanced to stray there.

He had been admiring the great camouflaged battleships on the Hudson River and reading of eminent members of the British Royal Academy, garbed as colonels, directing painters on the Western Front how to camouflage a gun emplacement into a village school or a poultry run.

A happy idea struck him: he would camouflage his dog—all but the tip of his tail. So he has, with the result that the dog now looks like something else, and enjoys complete immunity from the attentions of his neighbors, for he moves about as a beautiful cloud effect.

Camouflage | Organic Inevitability of Abstraction

Hypothetical dazzle camouflage / Part One and Part Two

Above Hypothetical dazzle ship camouflage schemes (2017) devised by Roy R. Behrens by isolating a single detail from each of various paintings, made by artists from the past (only one artist appears twice).

•••

Margaret Vandenburg, An American in Paris: A Novel. San Francisco CA: Cleis Press, 2001, an excerpt from a fictional conversation between Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway——

"My ambition is to render reality, which is itself a form of autobiography, with unwavering precision," said Picasso.

"How can you say that when your work is often so abstract?" Hemingway asked.

Picasso immediately took offense, "Abstract? Never!"

"But what about your theory about camouflage?" Hemingway insisted. "How the camouflage of each country is different, and how the subtle differences are the signatures of each nationality? And that camouflage itself proves the organic inevitability of modern abstraction?…"

•••

Woody Allen, from his stand-up comedy act—

…I was in Europe many years ago with Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway had just written his first novel, and Gertrude Stein and I read it, and we said that is was a good novel, but not a great one, and that it needed some work, but it could be a fine book. And we laughed over it. Hemingway punched me in the mouth. 

That winter Picasso lived on the Rue d'Barque, and he had just painted a picture of a naked dental hygienist in the middle of the Gobi Desert. Gertrude Stein said it was a good picture, but not a great one, and I said it could be a fine picture. We laughed over it and Hemingway punched me in the mouth. 

Francis Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald came home from their wild new years eve party. It was April. Scott had just written Great Expectations, and Gertrude Stein and I read it, and we said it was a good book, but there was no need to have written it, 'cause Charles Dickens had already written it. We laughed over it, and Hemingway punched me in the mouth. 

That winter we went to Spain to see Manolete fight, and he was... looked to be eighteen, and Gertrude Stein said no, he was nineteen, but that he only looked eighteen, and I said sometimes a boy of eighteen will look nineteen, whereas other times a nineteen year old can easily look eighteen. That's the way it is with a true Spaniard. We laughed over that and Gertrude Stein punched me in the mouth. 

For more on Gertrude Stein, go here>>>

Devising Dazzle Camouflage by Isolating Details 6

Hypothetical dazzle camouflage

Above Hypothetical dazzle ship camouflage schemes (2017) devised by Roy R. Behrens by isolating details from four areas of a single painting by a famous artist from the past. Can you name the artist?

•••

Steen Eiler Rasmussen, Experiencing Architecture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964, p. 94—

But the houses he [Le Corbusier] designed [during the late 1920s] were quite different—an attempt to create a Cubist framework for everyday life. They were color compositions without weight, just as intangible as the camouflage ships [in WWI].

Devising Dazzle Camouflage by Isolating Details 5

Hypothetical dazzle schemes

Above Hypothetical dazzle ship camouflage schemes (2017) devised by Roy R. Behrens by isolating details from four areas of a single painting by a famous artist from the past. Can you name the artist?

•••

Willa Cather, One of Ours. New York: Knopf, 1922, p. 272—

Over in the Cunard and French docks they saw the first examples of the "camouflage" they had heard so much about; big vessels daubed over in crazy patterns that made the eyes ache, some in black and white, some in soft rainbow colors.

Devising Dazzle Camouflage by Isolating Details 4

Hypothetical dazzle schemes

Above Hypothetical dazzle ship camouflage schemes (2017) devised by Roy R. Behrens by isolating details from four areas of a single painting by a famous artist from the past. Can you name the artist?

•••

Alfred E. Corebise, Art from the Trenches: America's Uniformed Artists in World War I. College Station: Texas A&M University, 1991, p. 26—

To [American artist and illustrator Ernest] Peixotto's artist eye, the [dazzle-painted] ships that he observed, "brilliantly camouflaged like wasps, queerly striped with black and white, with spots between of yellow, gray-blue, and water-green," or painted with low-visibility colors and "toned like Monet's pictures with spots of pink and green" never failed to fascinate.