Lin Bloomfield

I find Norman Lindsay a fascinating character. What skill with drawing. His facility as a child reminds me of Picasso drawing pigeons around the family home. And what an interesting individual....playing hooky from school and making drawings of it. This particular book really just concentrates on his pencil drawings ...though in many cases the drawings were the foundation of other work; in watercolour, ink, oils or etchings.
I guess that he has always been slightly fascinating for me because of his unabashedly powerful nudes....he anticipated the modern fantasy artists with these amazonian women with high bosoms and powerful thighs. I looked, in vain for a slim model.....he just never seemed to draw such women.
Yesterday, I came across another book about Lindsay....it was about his comic art ..and this was a rich other world ..only touched upon in passing by Lin Bloomfield in this book.
How did Lindsay get away with drawing all these voluptuous nudes (most of the drawings seem to be of women)...and how did he get away with incorporating them into his art when it seems totally irrelevant that they are naked in the larger works. He was operating in a pretty wowserish environment in Sydney and Victoria...and, of course, his works were controversial and sometimes banned. But seems to me that his work was the porn for the time...in fact, it was porn for me when I was a teenager....who never really saw any naked women or pictures of them apart from "art".
I've visited Lindsay's home at Faulconbridge ...and again ...I can only marvel that he was able to get away with having naked models. (Oh yes....there was a movie made about him some years back and the escapades at Faulconbridge). Though Lindsay claims that he "never laid an amorous hand on any of his models"..there were obviously plenty of rumours. I wonder why he had to keep up his (apparently) prodigious rate of drawing models ...I would have thought that he had just about exhausted the number of possible poses after a few years...but it seemed to continue for the whole of his life. And, if the text is to be believed, ..and I assume it's true....Lindsay worked very hard and worked long hours as an artist.
His talents were not confined to drawing....he made model ships, made sculpture ...including working with wet cement...which is no mean feat. He took up painting in oils rather later in life, he wrote stories (like the Magic Pudding)...was a cartoonist of some note...did portraits, drew animals, prints....which he etched himself whilst his partner for most of his life...Rose undertook the printing.
I think Lin Bloomfield has done a great job in the selection of the pictures and in relating them to a text which hangs together. 4.5 stars from me.… (meer)