On Visual Art and Camouflage

Abstract

In a number of books on visual fine art and design [1, 2], there is mention of the kinship between camouflage and painting, but no one has, to my knowledge, pursued it. I have intermittently researched this relationship for several years, and my initial observations have recently been published [3]. Now I have been awarded a faculty research grant from the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to pursue this subject in depth. I am, therefore, collecting documents and personal accounts pertaining to historical and theoretical connections of the kind that are listed below. Military and natural camouflage are often discussed in terms of the visual distinguishability of an object (e.g. or ship moth) in relation to its background or surroundings [4]. The requirements for distinguishability are included in what perceptual psychologists refer to as figure/ground theory [1, 5, 6]. Generally, the distinguishability of a figure is directly related to (a) the degree to which its components are visually homogeneous, and (b) the extent to which the figure is dissimilar from its surroundings or ground. Effective camouflage may violate one or both conditions through such techniques as blending, in which the color or other properties of the figure tend to resemble the characteristics of the background; disruptive patterning, in which the integrity of the figure is weakened by the visual heterogeneity of its components; countershading, in which a 3-dimensional figure bears a pattern of gradation that contradicts the gradation produced by sunlight, making the object look flat; and mimicry, in which the figure imitates the appearance of some other recognizable object. Descriptions and illustrations of these and various other camouflage techniques may be found in the writings of Cott [7-9]. A major breakthrough in the study of natural camouflage occurred in 1896 when Abbott H. Thayer, a painter in the U.S.A., published a paper on The Law Which Underlies Protective Coloration [10]. This was followed in 1902 by a paper on The Meaning of the White Under Sides of Animals [11 ] and, in 1909, by an influential book on Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom. An Exposition of the Laws of Disguise through Colour and Pattern, the illustration of which was assisted by the author's son, Gerald Thayer, and artists Rockwell Kent and Louis A. Fuertes [12]. The study of natural camouflage, wrote Thayer, 'has been in the hands of the wrong custodians ... it properly belongs to the realm of pictorial art, and can be interpreted only by painters. For it deals wholly in optical illusion, and this is the very gist of a painter's life' [12]. Thayer emphasized his discovery of countershading (Thayer's principle), in which the techniques of chiaroscuro are employed in camouflage just as in painting, but with opposite effects-