In 1996, Russell remarked that although he was to turn 70 in a few months, he is a young 70 years and that his family all live to ripe old ages. Therefore in years, Linda and he were perfectly matched as Linda is almost 60 years old (born 1937). He said we shouldn’t have to spend much time on earth without one another! In painting terms he gives all the credit to Linda, where as you and I know, the subtlety and magic comes from the combination. It occurred to me that he sees his helping Linda a bit like the old painters find it quite acceptable that their wives assist in the dotting of their works.
Linda was quite vocal and talked a lot about the early days (I recorded 6 tapes). I will need a linguist however to get to the bottom of a lot of it. It depends on how involved this book will be. It may be concentrate on imagery with her interpretation of the works plus interviews from curators and collectors, we won’t have to delve very deeply into the past, but if we have funding to pay a linguist all the better. She speaks 6 languages and one of the tapes is her talking in each of one.
It was quite amusing. On Monday night she was very relaxed and performed what appeared to be like short pieces of theatre in each language, one after the other. She then sang corroboree… a lot of women’s “singing up” business. She then took great delight in sitting listening to herself with the headsets on, making comments out loud like “that’s right! true way”.
