Abbott Handerson Thayer / family collection website

Not until today did we realize that there is now a major website, titled Abbott Handerson Thayer that features a large number of Thayer’s paintings, drawings, demonstrations, and photographs, many of which pertain to his research of camouflage, both natural and military. What a welcome, rich resource!

Also posted is a list of recent Thayer exhibitions, and a free downloadable pdf of the full-color, 68-page exhibition catalog, edited by Ari Post, titled Abbott Handerson Thayer: A Beautiful Law of Nature (2013), which includes three essays, by William Kloss, Martin Stevens, and myself. See also my recent 30-minute video talk on the same subject.

Part 03 has been posted / Ames and Anamorphosis

Unbelievable! At last I have completed it. Earlier this afternoon, I finished and posted on YouTube at <https://youtu.be/mxOEx2JLQBA> the third and final segment of a documentary trilogy on the life and work of Adelbert Ames II (known as Del Ames) (1880-1955), an American artist, lawyer, optical physiologist, and psychologist, best-known for having devised the Ames Demonstrations in Perception.

This part primarily focuses on Ames' influence on others, among them scientists, filmmakers, and artists, especially by his targeted use of anamorphosis (aka "forced perspective") in his well-known laboratory set-ups. It reveals the little-known links between Ames' experiments, Vorticism, and avant-garde filmmaking (Ballet Mécanique), as well as in popular culture, such as cinematic special effects and roadside tourist attractions.

In conclusion, it also provides a close-up look at the recent works of three contemporary visual artists, who, in one way or another, make astonishing use of perspective. They are Jan Beutener (Amsterdam), Richard Koenig (Kalamazoo MI), and Patrick Hughes (London).

All three parts of the trilogy (about 90 minutes in combined length) can be accessed online free at my YouTube channel at <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzYrUfsAvkZur5cBv6xlhSg>.  Of course, I am eager for others to see this. Do not hesitate to share it with anyone and everyone who might find it of value or interest.

exhibition video / National Maritime Museum in Brest

Nearly five years ago, we blogged about an exhibition on WWI ship camouflage at the National Maritime Museum in Brest, France. I posted twice about the event (here and here), which opened in October 1917 and continued through December 1918. Titled Razzle Dazzle: L’art contre-attaque!, the installation was designed by the French design firm, Collectif XYZ.

I have recently been notified by the museum’s director, Jean-Yves Besselièvre, that a video about the exhibition is now available online at this link. Reproduced here above and below on this blog page are several screen grabs from the video, including some of the ship models and the dazzle-painted building that houses the design firm.

Picasso on camouflage / we originated it with cubism

Cook: The Man Who Taught Gertrude Stein to Drive

Above Roy R. Behrens, Emeritus Professor of Art at the University of Northern Iowa and Independence (Iowa) native has released a new 60-minute online documentary film about Iowa expatriate artist William Edwards Cook, and his close long-term friendship with American writer Gertrude Stein.

•••

Gertrude Stein (speaking in the pretended voice of Alice B. Toklas), The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1933—

[In 1907, Pablo Picasso went back to Spain for the summer] and he came back with some spanish landscapes and one may say that these landscapes…were the beginning of cubism.…

…In these pictures he first emphasized the way of building in spanish villages, the line of the houses not following the landscape but cutting across and into the landscape, becoming undistinguishable in the landscape by cutting across the landscape. It was the principle of the camouflage the guns and the ships in the war. The first year of the war, Picasso and Eve, with whom he was living then, Gertrude Stein and myself, were walking down the boulevard Raspail a cold winter evening.…All of a sudden down the street came some big cannon, the first any of us had seen painted, that is camouflaged. Pablo stopped, he was spell-bound. C’est nous qui avons fait ça, he said, it is we that have created that, he said. And he was right, he had. From Cézanne through him they had come to that. His foresight was justified.

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

GTA Links to New Gestalt Theory Related Videos

We were recently pleased to learn that the website for the GTA (International Society for Gestalt Theory and its Applications) has set up a page of online links to New Gestalt Theory Related Videos, including active links to our own short documentary films on art, design and camouflage in relation to Gestalt. This is greatly appreciated. 

There is a list of all of all our films  on our YouTube Channel here. There will soon be more.