camouflage

I started thinking about camouflage when I was rereading Miller's story about Abraham Rattner in Remember to Remember...it's curious because Rattner's position as head of the school of camouflage department during the war certainly appears to have affected his early style of painting.

Now I can only get this from Miller cause their just aint many photos of his early work...he is hard to trace...Miller talks about it like this:  I am particularly found of the work of this period in which it seems his watery nature gains the ascendance...

A quality which I often described as "flou" made these canvases contrast sharply with his later work..work I am more familiar with which he did after his terrible back injury, his wife's death and the revalations of the death camps after the war.

In these canvases the human figure seems to blend with the pattern of nature in a sort of shadowy translucent marinescape.

All is flow and movement, arabesques of infinite motifs...often the canvas seems like a mirror reflecting the evanescent shapes and movement of lazy clouds.