The fourteen works exhibited are representative artifacts from a much larger body of findings about the relevance of camouflage to the history of modern design. The items I’ve included are mostly historic examples (both photographs and diagrams) of the camouflage of ships during World War I. As it happens, they are limited to examples of one kind of ship camouflage, which was known as “dazzle-painting.” It was not intended to conceal a ship, but rather to make it confusing when viewed at a distance through a periscope from a submerged submarine (called a U-boat).

Versluis Collaborative Works

This series of ten large-scale digital montages, called the Iowa Insect Series, were made in 2012-2013 in collaboration with my design colleague and friend David M. Versluis. At the time, he was a Professor of Art and Design at Dordt College in Iowa, while I was then on the faculty at the University of Northern Iowa. We became acquainted initially at several design conferences, and soon became friends.

These particular works began when David made high resolution digital scans of various insect specimens from his collection. We then worked together—but always from a distance, by email—by what might be referred to as “blind collaboration.” To begin, he would email me one of the insect image scans. I then did something to alter or augment that image (somewhat like a move in chess), and returned the result by email to him.

He then made additional alterations, and sent that second result to me. We continued blindly, back and forth, exchanging subsequent alterations, until we both began to sense that the work was nearing completion. We never backtracked, nor did either of us ever question the decisions of the other. Throughout the process, there was no explicit discussion about what direction to take, except in the sense of detecting when the work was all but finished. We did this on ten occasions, and what you see here are the ten montages that we produced.

Until his retirement from teaching in 2018, Roy R. Behrens was Professor of Art and Distinguished Scholar at the University of Northern Iowa. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, he had taught graphic design and design history at various art schools and universities for more than 45 years. 

He has published seven books, and literally hundreds of articles in journals, books, and magazines, and has appeared in broadcast interviews on NOVA, National Public Radio, Australian Public Radio, and BBC, as well as in documentary films. He has been a nominee for the Smithsonian Institution's National Design Awards, has received the Iowa Board of Regents Faculty Excellence Award, and has been described in Communication Arts magazine as "one of the most original thinkers in design." For many years, he was a Contributing Editor for Print magazine in New York.

Many of his publications concern the involvement of artists, designers, and architects in the development of Modern-era camouflage. His most recent book is Frank Lloyd Wright and Mason City: Architectural Heart of the Prairie (2016). 

In 1985, while teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, he launched a “periodical commonplace book” called Ballast Quarterly Review (the title is an acronym for Books Art Language Logic Ambiguity Science and Teaching), which he continued to publish for twenty-one years. All back issues of BALLAST can now be accessed online (and downloaded as pdf files) at <https://scholarworks.uni.edu/ballast/>.