Everybody work the dinosaur
Lynda Hallinan on the hip home trend that's roamed her house for years
First came the paleo diet, with its kale salads, cauliflower and cashew nut pizzas, and coconut and turmeric smoothies. Now brace yourself for the era of paleo decor. ‘‘Are Dinosaurs the Hot New Home Trend?’’ asked the British edition of Houzz recently. ‘‘Forget flamingos and pack away the pineapples. Dinosaurs are escaping the bounds of kids’ rooms and trampling their way into the rest of the house.’’ They’re also trampling through the garden. At the 2016 Chelsea Flower Show, designer Andy Sturgeon won the coveted Best in Show gong with a garden inspired by the bony plated spine of a stegosaurus, while 11 enormous dinosaur sculptures, including a 16-metre-tall electric blue brachiosaurus, were commissioned for this year’s Children’s Festival at Singapore’s astonishing Gardens By The Bay.
If you have more money than taste, lightweight but life-like dinosaur sculptures, once the preserve of theme parks and children’s playgrounds, can be ordered online from Ebay and Alibaba.com, while pint-sized Jurassic landscapes are ideal for trendy indoor glass-bowl terrariums.
And now Taschen has given dinosaurs the official arthouse seal of approval. The pioneering German publisher, famous for its doorstop tomes on David Bowie, David LaChapelle, erotica, advertising, architecture and design, has added a $125 work of dinosaur art to its collection.
Paleoart: Visions of the Prehistoric Past, written by Zoe¨ Lescaze with surreal illustrations by Walton Ford, is a remarkable curation of dinosaurs rendered in paintings, engravings, etchings, mosaics, murals and prints. English scientist Henry De la Beche is credited with painting the first piece of reptilian ‘‘paleo art’’ in 1830. At the time, fantasy and fact merged creatively on the canvas, for the first complete fossilised skeletons were yet to be unearthed.
Never heard of paleo art before? You’re not alone. It’s a neglected niche of art history, according to Taschen. ‘‘The collection shows how the artists charged with imagining extinct creatures often projected their own aesthetic whims onto prehistory, rendering the primordial past with dashes of Romanticism, Impressionism, Japonisme, Fauvism, and Art Nouveau.’’
Dinosaurs haven’t been this hip for at least 65 million years. Indeed, in a recent poll, 75 per cent of the occupants of my house declared dinosaurs to be the design motif du jour for pillowcases, wallpaper and pyjamas.
I am the mother of two young boys. We speak dinosaur as our household’s second language. We’ve watched all the Jurassic Park movies, The Good Dinosaur, The Land Before Time and the BBC’s Walking with Dinosaurs.
My kids play spot the difference with lizard-hipped carnivorous theropods, herbivorous sauropods and shieldplated ornithischia. They can recognise the long tail of an iguanodon, the strangely shaped skull of a parasaurolophus and, naturally, the big teeth of tyrannosaurus rex. ‘‘Its name means lizard king,’’ explains Lucas, aged 6.
Why are children, especially boys, so fascinated by the walking dead? Philosophers and parenting bloggers have many theories. It’s in our DNA, say some. Our imaginations have inherited a sense of primal awe that these fantastical creatures once walked the same soil we do.
Is it genetic, or gender-specific? Boys do seem, on the whole, to emerge from the womb with a love of big, powerful, destructive growly beasts: dinosaurs and diggers share equal footing.
My 4-year-old son Lachlan’s favourite YouTube videos are all dinosaur related. He’s enraptured by bloody battles pitching animated T Rex against T Rex, and yet, when we watched the movie Matilda, he was absolutely terrified by Pam Ferris’ portrayal of mean headmistress Agatha Trunchbull. He starts school in February; he’s petrified his principal will lock him in the chokey.
Unlike terrorists and sharks and snakes and wolves, or Hallowe’en witches and goblins and ghouls, every kid knows that dinosaurs pose no threat to their wellbeing. They’re somehow both scary and safe, even when they’re watching over you at night.
I recently wallpapered my children’s bedroom with Dotty Dinosaurs from the Kerry Caffyn Collection, described by wallpaperdirect.com as ‘‘created using a pointillism dot style in a restful symmetry, perfect for any budding palaeontologist’s bedroom’’.
‘‘Mum,’’ reported Lucas, proudly, the next morning. ‘‘Did you know there are 65 dinosaurs above our beds?’’
‘‘Gosh,’’ I said. ‘‘That’s quite precise. How did you count them all?’’
‘‘We crossed them off one-by-one with a red pen,’’ he said.
And if that ain’t a form of primitive cave painting, of primary school paleo art, then what is?