Norman Lindsay

I had another day off and decided to explore the Blue Mountains in direction of Sydney and eventually find somewhere to go shopping. I should not get that far.
Commencing the Great Western Highway past Katoomba, it got hotter and hotter in my non-airconditioned car. The signs marking the towns along the way promised a lot more than these villages could actually hold. The Jewel or the Heart of the Mountains, the First Settlement or the Original Blue Mountains Town turned out describe in euphemisms invented by tourist boards.
In Faulconbridge, the sign announcing the Norman Lindsay gallery rang a bell, I had briefly read about this in the Lonely Planet. Having been deprived of art* for a while I spontaneously decided to go. The museum and gallery are housed in the cottage he actually lived in till his dead in the 1990s. Norman Lindsay is supposed to be a very famous painter of Australia and the pride of his hometown. Well, his paintings are no doubt impressing, of a inspired by historical topics and ancient Greek mythology. To me it looked more like Jugendstil gone Mystery. Remarkable were the not so much so many nudes, but the lack of variety in their depiction. The boobs in picture were usually all of the same size and shape, as were more confusingly the eyes which gave most pictures a cartoonesque look. I left bemused and irritated.





*Art is used up here in its wider context. There are a lot of “art” galleries and shops selling arts and crafts, but that is generally pretty trashy bullshit I would not consider art in its original sense.