Dazzle Camouage Painting

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I've just finished the second in a series of dazzle camouflage canvases. The
painting measures 60" x 40" and was created with acrylic paint on canvas. This
composition is based on a detail of a dazzle ship photograph by Allie Wojtaszek.
The colours derive from original dazzle ship drawings that illustrate this post. In a
perfect world I would be happy to keep working on dazzle camouflage paintings
for the rest of my life! I love the modernist nature of the patterns and the use of
colour, which seems very much of its time. Painting is one of the best reminders
we have that the past actually did exist in colour so it's fun to be able to work with
a colour palette that existed nearly one hundred years ago. I seem to be getting
more and more obsessed with dazzle ships and their history after working on
these recent canvases and researching the subject. Dazzle ships are quite a
romantic notion to me and the idea of beautifully coloured ships floating over the
water in the dark is the sort of warm thought that puts me to sleep at night.
There are many ways that pattern-based camouflage has been used, but none are
as bizarre as the British dazzle ship designs of World War I and, to a lesser
degree, World War II. These were abstract, clashing geometric decorative designs
that were applied to battleships in order to confuse viewers, particularly German
U-boats, using optical range finders. Although dazzle paintwork is sometimes
described as camouflage, it actually wasnt intended to hide anything in the way
regular camouflage does. Instead, it made it difficult to determine important
aspects such as shape, distance, speed, and direction.
The development of radar in the 1940s made dazzle ship graphics less relevant,
but it still crops up here and there. In Austria, speed traps have been camouflaged
with dazzle to confuse drivers as to the direction the radar is pointing. Many car
prototypes also wear dazzle camouflage during testing to hide the "curves" of the
vehicle before the manufacturer is ready to show it to the public. The USS North
Carolina is still in dry dock in Willmington, where Blue Velvet was shot, so I hope
to be able to take a day trip there soon!
Peter Saville famously used Edward Wadsworth's 1919 painting Dazzle Ships In
Drydock At Liverpool (shown above) as the inspiration for the Orchestral
Manoeuvres in the Dark Dazzle Ships album cover. The original is in the National
Gallery of Canada. Peter Saville and Malcolm Garrett of Assorted iMaGes both
made their careers by brilliantly reinventing the past during the 80s, producing
album covers for Joy Division, New Order, Buzzcocks, Duran Duran, OMD, and
Peter Gabriel, amongst others. The original vinyl version of Dazzle Ships uses
Peter Saville's distinctive design on the gatefold cover and an information graphic
on the inner by Malcolm Garrett. The compact disc re-release uses the same
imagery with a completely different colour scheme.
Its very difficult to find colour images of the original WWI designs, but they typically
used red, green, yellow, and purple, lavender and mauve greys, and black and
white. The underlying principles are diagonals, zig-zags, and arcs, combined
using sudden changes in the patterns at seemingly random points used to give
impressions of different planes or facets on flat surfaces to break up physical lines
and shapes. The patterns make it difficult for onlookers to determine which
direction the ship is heading. Razzle dazzle deception uses abstractions to cloak
the activities of movement by seemingly creating more movement.
War has inspired many great artistic moments but artists very rarely return the
favour. During World War I, Modernism turned naval fleets into the largest painting
canvases in the world. German U-boats were sinking enormous numbers of ships
and there was no really effective defence against them. Most camouflage is based
on the idea of concealment and blending in with its surroundings. However, there
is another school of thought that argued for making the item in question appear to
be a camera obscura of unrelated components, which naval camoufleurs found
particularly appealing. Blending didnt work because ships operated in two
different and constantly changing colour environments sea and sky. Any
camouflage that concealed in one environment was hugely conspicuous in others.
There was very little method in the mass of triangles, parallelograms, and stripes
of these colors, but they had certainly been scientifically designed to secure the
effect sought for.
Military historians have often erroneously connected razzle dazzle with Cubism.
The dazzle concept was invented in 1916 by Norman Wilkinson, a British marine
painter and naval commander who took inspiration from Cubist and Vorticist
paintings. The Vorticists were the English equivalent of the Italian Futurists, and

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Dazzle Camouage Painting

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Edward Wadsworth, a leading Vorticist artist, supervised much of this dazzle ship
work, overseeing the camouflage of more than two thousand war ships. Razzle
dazzle is quite clearly inspired by Vorticism, which is probably the only significant
British art movement of the early 20th century, started by Wyndham Lewis, editor
of the brilliant but short-lived Blast magazine. Picasso is reported to have taken
credit for the modern camouflage experiments, which seemed to him a
quintessentially Cubist technique. He is reported to have drawn the connection in
a conversation with Gertrude Stein shortly after he first saw a painted cannon
trundling through the streets of Paris. However, Cubism was far more concerned
with apples, guitars, and life in the cafe while Vorticism was not afraid of looking
outside the cafe and observing the architecture surrounding it. Also, there was a
hint of aggression, conflict, and Brutalism in most Vorticist works that is entirely
missing in French work. Vorticist works are characterised by the unease created
by a disrupted perspective, which is a perfect metaphor for dazzle camouflage.
Wilkinson believed that breaking up a ships silhouette with brightly contrasting
geometric designs would make it harder for U-boat captains to determine the
ships course. While there was a marked decrease in losses to U-boats, historians
agree that this reduction was mainly due to the adoption of the convoy system at
the same time. Dazzle did, however, boost the morale of allied seamen as well as
capture the imagination of artists and the public alike. All British patterns were
different, first tested on small wooden models viewed through a periscope in a
studio. Most of the model designs were painted by women from London's Royal
Academy of Arts. A foreman then scaled up their designs for the real thing.
Creative people including sculptors, artists, and set designers also designed
camouflage.
An observer would find it difficult to know exactly whether the stern or the bow is in
view; and it would be equally difficult to estimate whether the observed vessel is
moving towards or away from the observer's position. Range finders were based
on the coincidence principle with an optical mechanism, operated by a human to
compute the range. Dazzle was intended to make that hard because clashing
patterns looked abnormal even when the two halves were aligned. As an
additional feature, the dazzle pattern usually included a false bow wave intended
to make estimation of the ship's speed difficult. This led to more scientific studies
of colour options which might enhance camouflage effectiveness. Broken colour
systems which present units so small as to be essentially invisible at the distances
considered are neither advantageous nor detrimental to the dazzle effect; the
visibility of the camouflaged vessel at a given distance would depend entirely upon
such scientifically measurable factors as the mean effective reflection factor, hue,
and saturation of the surface when considered at various distances.
American naval leadership thought dazzle effective and, in 1918, the U.S. Navy
adopted it as one of several of their techniques. However effective the scheme
was in World War I, dazzle camouflage became less useful as rangefinders and
especially aircraft became more advanced, and, by the time it was put to use
again in World War II, radar had further reduced its effectiveness. The U.S. Navy
implemented a camouflage painting program in World War II, and applied it to
many ship classes which were in use until the end of the war. As far as I know
dazzle camouflage was never used on any submarines.
The British Royal Navy dazzle paint schemes also reappeared in January 1940;
these were unofficial and competitions were often held between ships for the best
camouflage patterns. The Royal Navy Camouflage Department came up with a
scheme devised by wildlife artist Peter Scott, and developed it into the Western
Approaches Schemes. The German Navy first used camouflage in the 1940
Norwegian campaign. A wide range of patterns were authorised, but most
commonly black and white diagonal stripes were used. Most patterns were
designed to hide ships in harbour or near the coast; they were often painted over
with plain grey when operating in the Atlantic.
At first glance, dazzle seems an unlikely form of camouflage, drawing attention to
the ship rather than hiding it. However, dazzle did not conceal the ship but made it
difficult for the enemy to estimate its type, size, speed, and heading. The idea was
to disrupt the visual rangefinders used for naval artillery. Its purpose was
confusion rather than concealment. The artist Abbott Handerson Thayer did carry
out an experiment on dazzle camouflage, but it failed to show any reliable
advantage of dazzle over plain paintwork. In a 1919 lecture, Norman Wilkinson
explained: "The primary object of this scheme was not so much to cause the
enemy to miss his shot when actually in firing position, but to mislead him, when
the ship was first sighted, as to the correct position to take up. Dazzle is method to
produce an effect by paint in such a way that all accepted forms of a ship are
broken up by masses of strongly contrasted colour, consequently making it a
matter of difficulty for a submarine to decide on the exact course of the vessel to
be attacked. When making a design for a vessel, vertical lines were largely
avoided. Sloping lines, curves and stripes are by far the best and give greater
distortion."

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