Having looked in the last few posts at World War II and '40s styles, let's go even backwards in time to the First World War and explore dazzle patterns (also mentioned in previous posts in connection with specific fashion collections here and there) via a display at the Zaha Hadid-designed Riverside Museum in Glasgow.
The display recounts how the Admiralty decided to adopt Normal Wilkinson's tactic to paint ships in striking patterns. His London studio was busy with artists, model makers and students - also known as the Dazzle Section - coming up with designs and testing them out.
Dazzle was a completely new idea, so Wilkinson and the team made up their own rules: they only used black and shades of grey, green, blue, white and olive to create dramatic patterns.
Thousands of different schemes were designed, but the aim was always the same - confuse U-boat commanders and give British ships vital minutes to escape the attack.
The designers (one of the professional artists working on dazzle paintigs was Edward Wadsworth, in charge of 120 staff at Liverpool docks) used stripes, harlequin checks, curves, arcs, patchwork and sawtooth patterns. The effect of sea salt meant that dazzle ships needed repainting every four to six months.
Dazzle patterns definitely had connections with art and in particular with the Cubists and the Vorticists who were painting familiar objects in radically new ways making them look unrecognisable.
The display features two examples: Juan Gris' "Le Verre" (1919), that looks like a kaleidoscope of random shapes and striking colours, but it actually portrays an ordinary glass, showing the stem, the side view and top all at once. The other example is Riponelli's "A Village in Lemnos" (1912) that looks like a tangle of geometrical forms, though a a closer look reveals a bell-tower and the old buildings of a hillside village in the Mediterranean.
We don't know if the Admiralty shared this belief (making familiar objects look unrecognisable....), but the main point behind dazzle patterns was definitely similar as proved by two models in the display cabinet. The first one is the SS War Drake, an 'A' type standard cargo vessel. It was built by D&W Henderson Shipbuilders in Meadowside Yard - directly opposite the current location of the Riverside Museum.
Built by Barclay Curle & Company Glasgow, HMS Sefton was instead launched at Scotstoun, Glasgow, in 1918, probably already painted in this dazzle scheme. A scale drawing (first image in this post) shows a ship that matches with the dazzle motifs on the HMS Sefton, even though the latter is not listed among the ships on the drawing (note: dazzle drawings are protected by the Official Secrets Act).
Interested in dazzle painting and in mind-warping patterns? Take a note in your diary about the Patternity Festival of Pattern (Londonewcastle Project Space, 28 Redchurch Street, E2 7DP, London, 17- 22 September 2015), part of the London Design Festival.
Curated by Patternity co-founders Anna Murray and Grace Winteringham, the festival will attempt to put together a new sort of "Dazzle Section" comprising artists, designers and industry professionals, and will look at patterned projects and installations while offering visitors the chance to join in hands-on pattern-making workshops, pattern-spotting field trips, industry talks and roundtable discussions and look at the power of patterns exploring their role and positive influence in our lives.
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