Note: I came upon this piece in rummaging around in old computer files. I must have saved this for a reason.  Way back, I had been writing poetry before I had set up a home studio for painting.

August (the "cruelest month") has been deemed National Poetry Month. Here is another take on that:

…As an alternative to National Poetry Month, I propose that we have an International Anti-Poetry month. As part of the activities, all verse in public places will be covered over—from the Statue of Liberty to the friezes on many of our government buildings. Poetry will be removed from radio and TV (just as it is during the other eleven months of the year). Parents will be asked not to read Mother Goose and other rimes to their children but only ... fiction.

Religious institutions will have to forego reading verse passages from the liturgy and only prose translations of the Bible will recited, with hymns strictly banned. Ministers in the Black churches will be kindly requested to stop preaching. Cats will be closed for the month by order of the Anti-Poetry Commission.

Poetry readings will be replaced by self-help lectures. Love letters will have to be written only in expository paragraphs. Baseball will have to start its spring training in May. No vocal music will be played on the radio or sung in the concert halls. Children will have to stop playing all slapping and counting and singing games and stick to board games and football.

As part of the campaign, the major daily newspapers will run full page ads with this text:

Go ahead, don't read any poetry.

You won't be able to understand it anyway:
the best stuff is all over your head.

And there aren't even any commercials to liven up the action.

Anyway, you'll end up with a headache trying to figure out
what the poems are saying because they are saying

NOTHING.

Who needs that.

Better go to the movies

Copyright 1999 Charles Bernstein

Why Support Local Artists?

Art invites us to jump in and consider this question: what kind of world do we envision and want to create for our children and the children of the world?

Art (the arts) encourages kindness and compassion. It helps us listen and observe. Art brings us together and gives us confidence and trust. Art can give us light, warmth, and color, to calm our fears, open our hearts, and strengthen our communities.

With art and all that art provides us, almost anything can be accomplished. Without it, life is truly difficult. And it starts right here.

Imaginary Landscapes – Part 2

The dazzling animal fur patterns that humans so admire and prize in predatory cats such as tigers and leopards, and graceful prey creatures including zebras and giraffes serve the purpose of survival in the wild. They allow these animals to blend into the background or confuse the eye as to where they are and what they are. In fact, camouflage is common in the animal kingdom. Ironically, it is these very desirable patterns of fur and feather that have lead to these animals’ endangerment.

Camouflage also serves a survival value in military endeavors. As a counter example, the British Red Coats during the American Revolutionary War would have fared better in drab olive green or brown uniforms. The redness of their coats enabled the British soldiers and officers to identify each other in a wooded landscape, but also made them easy targets for the more rag-tag soldiers of the American Revolution.

During World War I, the military use of camouflage accelerated and became more sophisticated. Battleships were painted in dazzling zebra stripes to hide them from enemy eyes or painted white so as to disappear along the horizon. Villages in Belgium were hidden by camouflage, as were cement “pillboxes” that hid ammunition. The British had become especially good at the art and science of concealment. They provided training for their own soldiers and American military staff, including camouflage expert Colonel John Ohmer, Jr. Later, in Word War II, it was especially important to use camouflage to hide from surveillance cameras shooting photos or film from above.

Concealing an ammunition pillbox during WWI

I’m not sure why, technically, but often the human eye can catch hidden items better when looking at black and white photographic images than in real life. We’re actually good at finding things that don’t look quite right or look out of place this way.

Aircraft factories along the West Coast of the United States were often constructed from wood frames and thus especially prone to damage and destruction by fire, bombing, and aerial attack. To protect and conceal these factories, vital to the war effort, including the Boeing plants just south of Seattle, faux suburbs were constructed on top of acres of factory space. This was a joint endeavor by military camouflage experts and Hollywood film crews, using the magic engendered by the creation of movie sets, lighting effects, and related motion picture know-how. The “prop villages” must have also been reasonably attractive places for Boeing workers to take a break or even have a picnic, as archival photos suggest.

I had wanted to capture the images posted online of these make-believe yet very real structures and their denizens using a “realistically unrealistic,” or perhaps “unrealistically realistic” style. These images had me thinking about theatrical stage sets, the animated cartoons I loved as a young child, and magic shows. It also led to my thinking about the way that so much of 2-D art is an illusion and how we use perspective and color to trick the eye into seeing a flat surface with the dimension of depth. Starting sometime around the Renaissance, (I’m not entirely sure of my art history) and the development of optical devices, artists began to focus on the use of perspective to create entire towns and villages on wood and canvas.

I had to admit my art skills weren’t up to the task that I had playfully envisioned. Out of five paintings, it turned out that there was only one that I liked, “Lady in Red Jacket.” The lady in the painting could be a flight attendant from the 1940's or maybe a real estate lady posing in front of a new suburban development, or maybe neither of the above. The other four paintings look to me like they might be good scaffolds for some collage work, a la Romare Bearden, one of my art heroes. The Boeing workers with headscarves holding their hair back from machinery could use an art paper flourish? The trees could look more like chicken wire and burlap constructions using bark paper? I intend to start working on this soon…

A picnic at the Boeing faux suburb

My father, Murray Meld, who served in the US Army during WWII in the Signal Corps, taught my sister and I how to use camouflage as a way of enhancing the game of “hide and seek.” It was fun to be able to conceal yourself in a wooded field and not be found till later on. I hadn’t thought about this for many years until my niece, Hanna Rose Shell, wrote her doctoral dissertation on camouflage and published a book titled “Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance (2012).” Since re-reading this book, I have started to explore the connections between camouflage, visual art, and set design for movies. I stumbled upon a fascinating story that happened close to home, near Seattle.

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, launching the US into War II, it seemed likely that bases and factories along the West Coast would be targeted by Japanese military aircraft. Wooden aircraft assembly buildings, including Boeing Plant 2 near Seattle, would have been especially vulnerable to fire-bombing. With this perceived threat, a 26-acre “faux suburb” was fabricated to make Plant 2 “disappear.” Fortunately, this threat never materialized in Seattle.

Colonel John F. Ohmer, Jr., then commander of a training center that specialized in camouflage, recruited Hollywood civilians, including John Detlie, an Oscar-nominated art director at MGM to conceal the Boeing plants. Hollywood artisans were experts at creating illusion, after all. The false neighborhood, resembling nearby South Park, at least from the air, were constructed on top of the assembly buildings, complete with fake streets, trees, wooden cars, and homes to life-size scale, except for being only 6 feet tall. Maybe even a store and service station. The deception was further enhanced by employees having picnics on the false lawns, changing the colors of the vegetation with the seasons, and moving the cars about from time to time. I wonder what the employees thought about this unusual but mostly pleasant assignment.

It seemed that the same set photos, more or less, were posted online, across different websites, and I wondered what the story behind the photos, themselves, might be. I was inspired to use them as reference photos, and I’ve been working on five paintings for an event at the Museum of Flight in Tukwila. (I almost wrote “Museum of Fright!”) We’ll see… please stay tuned.

A source for photos and related story:

popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a34337257/hollywood-hid-wwii-aircraft-factories/