RAZZLE by Krister Lile
From Naval Survival to Personal Style: A History of Dazzle Camouflage
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
©Krister Lile, 2019 0 /1
Dear Reader, I’ve always loved small odd books. When I was in grade school, I drew lots and lots of sailing ships and rowing boats; I would then staple-bind the drawing sheets together into a short book. Junior high was all about watch catalogs from companies so fancy that their tiny free catalog was nicer than most coffee-table books. In high school, I grew an affinity for well-photographed furniture catalogs and amassed a collection of highly conceptual art-college catalogs from the 1980s and 90s. In college, I dated a cut/paste/paper wizardess, took a course in book arts, and when my Photoshop class assignment was creating a portfolio of my work, I found incredible joy designing my own magical booklet from start to finish for the first time. For the last decade plus, I’ve continued my zeal for small odd books, but it’s been entirely passive. No collecting, no making. During this past decade, I’ve also been filling up a dusty box in the back room of my subconscious ambition. The label on the box read “someday.” A few months ago I found it and, looking more closely, discovered the label actually read “never.” Someday is pretty much never. If you’re not doing that thing, or booking that trip, then you’re not doing that thing or taking that trip. I decided at that point to assign myself 12 self-directed projects for the year. Each project is about taking a creative idea from the box (something I had dreamed up and abandoned), dusting off its intent and zeal, and doing it. Not for clients, not for others, not for money, but just for me. These are projects that create a wild feeling within me, leave a grin across my face and bring me joy. This book is my first of 12 projects. It’s a story I want to tell, so I’m telling it. It’s perfect in that it’s happening: I’m sharing and I’m grinning. Ultimately, the 12 projects are about doing the important things now. Doing the things that make you you now. It’s about saying my piece now, your piece now, to making someday today so we can become the ones we want to become sooner, so later we can become even more than seems possible today. This book is dedicated to the unlimited and magical us, hiding within the regular us. Seize today. -Krister Lile 2019.2.28
IT ALL BEGAN WITH THIS PAINTING > >
A few years ago, as part of preparations for my marriage proposal to my now-wife Kate (it’s another story, a good one), I was doing a research project about a group of Atlantic coast Canadian painters called “The Group of Seven.” I ran across this energetic painting from 1918 by Arthur Lismer. On first glance, I fell in love with this painting, but I kept getting stuck on the crazy striped ship. It obviously wasn’t painted like that in real life, so what on earth was going on? Finding the answer led to another research project, a project after that, and then to another: this very book.
Franklin Carmichael
Lawren Harris
A. Y. Jackson
Later Group of Seven Members: A. J. Casson, Edwin Holgate, LeMoine FitzGerald
Frank Johnston
Arthur Lismer
J. E.H. MacDonald
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Frederick Varley
“Olympic with Returned Soldiers,” Arthur Lismer, 1918
A PROBLEM AT SEA
Throughout World War 1, German U-boats were sinking British and Allied ships by the score. By 1917, the situation was urgent and something radical had to be done.
TARGETING A SURFACE SHIP WITH A PERISCOPE IS A MATH PROBLEM. A U-BOAT GUNNER WOULD HAVE TO TRIANGULATE WHERE THE ENEMY SHIP WOULD BE MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE USING A COMBINATION OF THE SHIP’S HEADING (DIRECTION), ITS SPEED OF TRAVEL AND OTHER FACTORS, ALL IN RELATION TO THOSE OF THE U-BOAT AND THE TORPEDOES.
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IT WASN’T ONLY WARSHIPS, THE IMPERIAL GERMAN NAVY BEGAN SINKING ANYTHING THEY ENCOUNTERED, MERCHANT OR MILITARY. BY WAR’S END GERMAN U-BOATS SANK MORE THAN 6000 SHIPS.
SOMETHING NEW
In 1917, a radical solution to the U-Boat problem arrived. Amidst failed, fruitless and often absurd efforts to camouflage ships at sea, reserve British navyman and maritime painter Norman Wilkinson took a radically different tack: instead of aiming for low/ no visibility, his camouflage designs created hypervisibility. Bold striping schemes in black, white, blue and green were painted across all parts of a ship, visually merging and tangling a boat’s bow, stern, sides and features. Dazzled and confused, U-boat gunners found it more difficult to determine the surface ships’ heading and speed. Soon thousands of British Merchant and Royal Navy ships were painted into the scheme and a massive effort was overseen by the new department actually named: “Dazzle Section.”
DAZZLED!
While Dazzle was broadly used by both British and American navies, seeing historical images a century later of these massive, colorfully striped fleets is as challenging to believe as it is delightful to behold. As I began doing more research into the history of Dazzle, I realized just how vulnerable my living room fireplace was to threat of being targeted by marauding U-boats searching for the aesthetically forgettable. So, I set up my own Dazzle Section and got to work.
DAZZLE-PAINTED MERCHANT VESSEL AS SEEN THROUGH U-BOAT PERISCOPE.
THE SAME VESSEL ON IDENTICAL COURSE, PAINTED GREY.
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DAZZLE SECTION 2.0
*�CAMOUFLEUR�: one who devises camouflage
Upon its invention by Wilkinson and rapid approval by British Admiralty, Dazzle designs were in immediate demand. In order to ensure maximum effect, few ships could be painted the same so, Royal College of Art students were enlisted to help develop the thousands of required designs.
From my original drawing, I created 30 small Dazzle concept sketches to get a feel for what worked and what
Once the painted ship models were ready, they were placed on a turntable before a periscope, then surrounded and lit such that they could be analyzed in different sea conditions and times of day and night to determine which Dazzle pattern was most effective. I digitized that process by taking a photo of my fireplace, inserting my sketches into the photo on the computer and from there choosing the best pattern and experimenting with and finalizing the coloring. With final designs chosen, scaled drawings of the patterns were created, then drawn by hand, by the camoufleurs themselves, directly onto the docked vessels, creating a very large scale paint-by-numbers operation. I did the same to my fireplace.
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Designing Dazzle of my own, 100 years on, the process remained very much the same. Instead of working on a scaled down wooden ship model, I began with a scaled down drawing of my simple fireplace. Historically, the model would be painted and repainted multiple ways until a few designs promising maximum visual disruption were in hand.
did not. Those sketches led to larger sketches and some cut-and-paste layering (see opposite) to allow for rapid adjustments. Since my own goal was historic and aesthetic in nature, the visual disruption I sought became less about trying to obscure the shape of my fireplace and more about creating a provocative, beautiful pattern plausibly seen on a ship.
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PAINTING
DEW340 Whisper Dunn-Edwards DEA188 Black Bay Dunn-Edwards DEA123 Chartreuse Dunn-Edwards
“[Painting a ship] was no place for a dainty man, for a rain of things descended on us. Bolts, hot rivets, scraps of iron, and heavier things like lumps of wood and heavy pieces of rope… A camoufleur is not a camoufleur unless he falls overboard regularly once a week.” -An unnamed American camoufleur in the Christian Science Monitor, 1919 10 /11
DEA147 Garnet Evening Dunn-Edwards
A DAZZLING & SEAWORTHY NEW FIREPLACE
100 years after its wartime invention, Dazzle, which became a peacetime cultural phenomenon in the arts, is still a provocative, energizing design tool and in telling its history, that history feels like only a beginning. Dazzling my fireplace energized the room as I hoped, but more than that, the entire Dazzle process— discovery, research, experimentation, and the creation of this book— has energized me, many people I speak to and now, hopefully, you too.
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RAZZLE From Naval Survival to Personal Style: A History of Dazzle Camouflage
Krister Lile is an artist, designer, knot-tyer, outdoorsman, author and contagious positive thinker who lives in Los Angeles, California, where he’s secretly spiking the public water supply with even more stoke.
Book Design, Illustrations + Writing Š by Krister Lile, 2019 Copyediting by Lorna Partington Printed in Los Angeles republicofkrister.com
a REPUBLIC OF KRISTER book