Colin Moss
Wartime Work
Camoufleur
When WWII broke out Colin Moss, like many artists, applied to the Ministry of Home Security to undertake camouflage work. Working on the camouflage of buildings and industrial installations, he was based at the Ministry’s Camouflage Establishment at Royal Leamington Spa from 1939-1943. Known as Camoufleurs, it was made up of the foremost artists, architects, sculptors and theatre designers of their generation. At its peak, the camouflage directorate employed over 230 staff.
When his time at Leamington ended, Colin was given a month’s paid leave to record his designs before being called up. He was transferred to active service in North Africa. A number of those paintings are now owned by the Imperial War Museum in London and featured in their major 2007 exhibition “Camouflage”.
Yet more of Colin’s wartime paintings are owned by Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum. 11 of them featured in their Concealment and Deception exhibition in 2016:
Military Service
Although his work as a camouflage designer for the Ministry of Home Security is now acclaimed, it was his wartime experiences as a soldier on active duty in North Africa and Palestine during WWII that led to the production of some of his most powerful pieces.
“I made drawing such as The Guardrooom in the immediate post-war years, but then I gradually moved out of the war ethos and it wasn’t until very much later indeed that I suddenly had an inclination to do more of these memories of the war. I found that although it was 30 or 40 years after I remember them quite vividly.” Colin Moss : Life Observed
The paintings Colin describes were produced at the end of the 1970s. They include a large oil called “Playing Soldiers”, showing men in desert kit spending some hours of leisure time before the next manoeuvre.
One of the most haunting of Colin’s paintings, produced in the early 1980s, was Moonlight Over the Third Reich (now owned by the Ben Uri Gallery). “The painting arose from, I think, a feeling that I too must make some kind of record of the Holocaust.” Colin Moss : Life Observed.
Camoufleur
A Camouflage Scheme in Progress
1943
Imperial War Museum
The Big Tower, Camouflaged
1943
Imperial War Museum
Military Service
After the Blitz
Exodus
