C A M O U P E D I A: graphic designer

Monday, April 21, 2025

stained glass artist / WWI camoufleur / bird enthusiast

Len R. Howard, Grace Church window

Surely, there can’t be many people—outside of those who specialize in stained glass window design— who have ever heard of a British-born American artist named Len R. Howard. Born Leonard Richard Howard in London on August 2, 1891, he became a youthful apprentice at a large British stained glass company, James Powell and Sons. He had also attended school at St. Martins and the Camberwell Art School in London.

Howard moved to the US in 1913, where he studied in New York at the Art Students League, and Pratt Institute. He was living in Boston in June 1917, when he registered for the draft. He had moved to the US from England in 1913. Two years later, he married an American woman named Madeleine Copping, and began to apply for citizenship. Soon after, they settled in New England, and Howard continued his studies at the Copley Society in Boston.

World War I began in Europe in 1914, but the US did not enter the war until 1917. In that year, Howard joined the army, and was assigned to the Camouflage Corps of the AEF, during which he served in France.

Len R. Howard

When the war ended, he returned to the US, where he worked for the Gorham Company in New York. In 1922, he and his wife settled in Kent CT, where he established his own commercial studio, where he designed stained glass windows. According to an article in the Scarsdale Inquirer (March 2, 1951), “His windows are in business buildings, churches and schools all over the country.”

During the Depression, Howard was commissioned by the WPA Federal Arts Project to complete a stained glass window, titled American Literature, for the high school in New Milford CT. Years later (c1963), he also designed a major window for Grace Church in Milbrook NY. That window, known as "the Lincoln window" (shown at the top of this blog post) was initially controversial because it portrays Abraham Lincoln as a “savior,” and because its imagery includes a reference to a slave auction.

Whatever the circumstances, Howard was also interested in birds. He was the author of two unusual books on the subject (both illustrated with photographs and drawings), titled Birds as Individuals, and Living with Birds. There is online access to both at Internet Archive. He continued to work into his eighties. He died in 1987 in Arkansas.

Friday, March 29, 2024

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.

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