Friday Five: Hair Histrionics

Last week I coloured my hair (with the help of friends). It is now red. It's taken several days to get used to it, and although I still get a bit of a shock when I see my reflection, I like it. Yes, it's different and a break from my previous look, which I've always tried to keep along the lines of 'natural' and 'subtle', but it's still me. 

I haven't changed at all, obviously, but you would think I have somehow become less human/ sensitive on account of it. While many people tell me they love it (after they have told me I've changed the colour, as if I might not have noticed) I have been amazed by the highly personal, and not exactly diplomatic comments of others.

5 Things people have said to me about my new hair colour:

1. Wow, that's brave.
2. Do you like it? Really? What does your husband think?
3. What made you do that?
4. Don't you think you should try a different shade?
5. That can't be good for you.

So for the record, yes, I do like it. So does Him Outdoors. And that's really all that matters, as far as I'm concerned. And also, so does Niece Niamh, who sent me a text saying, "It looks very good on you." And she's the expert.

Norman Lindsay: Gallery at Faulconbridge

While we were in the Blue Mountains, we went to the Norman Lindsay Gallery at Faulconbridge - the artist's former home. Norman Lindsay (1879 - 1969) is most known for illustrating the Aussie children's classic, The Magic Pudding, but he also painted watercolours, sketched cartoons and made models of ships. The gallery contains many of these.

We were taken on a very lacklustre tour in which the guide didn't seem particularly interested. Lindsay married Catherine (Kate) Agatha Parkinson in 1900, and she operated his heavy and cumbersome printing equipment, encouraged and supported his career, and bore him three sons (Jack: 1900; Raymond: 1903; Philip: 1906). In typical male artist fashion, however, Lindsay began an affair with Rose Soady, who began modelling for him in 1902. By the time he left for London in 1909, Rose had supplanted his wife, and joined him there in 1910. He divorced Kate in 1918 and married Rose in 1920.

The gardens are full of sculptures and fountains featuring suggestive nudes and lewd fawns. None of the women in his artwork look particularly attractive. All of them seem ugly, crudely sexual and aggressively predatory. I didn't really like them, although I appreciated his talent, but Him Outdoors was distinctly unimpressed.

These nudes were highly controversial in their time; when Soady took sixteen crates of his art to the U.S. in 1940 to protect them from the war, they were impounded when the train they were travelling on caught fire, and subsequently burned as pornographic material. He also wrote several books which were banned by the censors, and caused a stir when he wrote such an enduring popular children's book.

In 1994 Sam Neill played a fictionalised version of Lindsay in John Duigan's Sirens, set and filmed mainly at Lindsay's Faulconbridge home. I saw the film at the time and knew nothing of the artist - I thought it was just a sexist piece of soft porn featuring a lot of dripping wet women (including Elle MacPherson in her  film debut) in lakes being leched at by some pervy old bloke. No further comment.