Unconventions: Attempting the Art of Craft and the Craft of Art

How to Hide a Tank: Camouflage, Realism, and Believing Our Eyes

Another Warren Wilson lecture. This time I displayed huge swatches of material printed with numerous patterns of military camouflage. I am deeply indebted to Roy Behrens and his work on art and camouflage. His magazine, Ballast, can be subscribed to by sending him a sheet of stamps. His฀head฀was฀the฀size฀of฀a฀pea, the carved furrows of his beard like the wrinkles on a raisin. I crossed my eyes, focusing on the point of my 000 sable brush. There trembled a speck of gloss-black paint, a droplet smaller than the period at the end of this sentence, that would become the pupil of his eye once I applied it to the center of the fleck of already painted blue iris scuffing the base smudge of white. I would shape the eye later, coaxing the flesh beneath it into a cheek, adding a mascara dash that blotted most of the white, then arching a ragged line of a lid over it, the eyebrows smaller than a serif. I was at the awkward age, in junior high. I hoped to avoid the burgeoning social obligations (such as dances and make-out parties staged in my classmates’ rec rooms) and deny the undeniable onset of puberty (my own hormonal palette was doing a number on the raw red canvas of my face). My strategy was to take up a hobby, and so I retreated to my father’s basement workshop to How฀to฀Hide฀a฀Tank ฀ CAMOUFLAGE,฀REALISM,฀AND฀BELIEVING฀OUR฀EYES 132 play with toy soldiers. These were not the posed plastic soldiers of children, however, the ones that came in bags of five hundred that I spent the mornings setting up in elaborate battle formations in the desert sandbox only to casually knock down on my way to lunch. No, these soldiers were for adults, ordered from a special New York store, the Soldier Shoppe on Madison Avenue, cast in an alloy of lead and tin, 54 mm in height, a scale that is about half the size of a pencil length and no wider than a finger, assembled with two tubes of epoxy mixed together with toothpicks. They came unpainted, and the point of collecting and constructing these soldiers was the studious and copious historical research required to determine and reproduce the soldier’s costume. I told you I was awkward. Imagine that thirteen-year-old boy crouched over books with glossy plates of colorful uniforms and collections of regimental colors. Grenadiers, fusiliers, dragoons. I noted the shade of the piping on the breeches, the braid and epaulets on the shoulder, the fold of the boot and the drape of the great coat, the darts on a marine’s short tunic, the pleats pressed into a Highlander’s kilt, the way the hussars wore their jackets off their shoulders and the lancers cocked their shakos. I meticulously rendered the gold flaming grenade on the collar, or I mixed exactly the paint for the bright yellow facing turned back with silver buttons. At thirteen and thoroughly nerdy, I had successfully disguised myself as an old fart in a cardigan and sweatpants puttering around in a basement. It could have been a train layout. It could have been ships in a bottle. All these pursuits share the impulse to get lost in the trivia of minutia, the overheated desire for accuracy and perfection. I even had magnifying goggles and jewelers loupes of different powers! The pea-sized head I referred to above belonged to a model of a sapper, a combat engineer, of Napoleon’s Old Guard. See the characteristic bearskin busby, the buff-colored gauntlets, and the leather apron worn over the French blue great coat. Although the figure represented a soldier at the time of post-revolutionary Waterloo, the Old Guard still was allowed to wear white culottes of royal design. The sappers carried a short sword along with a huge Camouflage,฀Realism฀ 133 axe, the tool of the engineer’s trade, as symbolized by the excruciatingly small cross-axe device I daubed on each arm in off-white. If one were to take up this hobby of building military miniatures , one usually concentrated on the Napoleonic period. There are several reasons for this, the obvious being that historical, technical , and political forces conspired at that moment to produce great-looking garb for the uniform enthusiast. There were more nations then...