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The first work one encounters in Cressida Campbell – the National Gallery of Australia’s expansive and exhilarating survey of the leading Australian painter and printmaker – is a medium-sized print from 2010 that depicts a cropped view of her shell collection on three glass shelves.
Accompanying it is a caption. Campbell, who was born in Sydney in 1960, recalls that when she was a child, her mother would sometimes slip shells she’d bought into rock pools for her youngest daughter to find while the family enjoyed their annual holidays at Pearl Beach. Upon discovering one of the shells was from Papua New Guinea, young Cressida wondered how it had made its way south. Her mother replied: “Oh darling, remember that huge storm we had last week…”
This reminiscence highlights Campbell’s dry humour and the fact she’s a long-time collector of objects, precious and quotidian, many of which appear in her pictures. It may also be a gentle prompt by curator Sarina Noordhuis-Fairfax that in art – as in life – what often appears to be so beautiful and “right” that it seems natural and effortless is actually the result of in(ter)vention. In Campbell’s art, the meticulous orchestration of line, form, colour, space and pattern to achieve compositional harmony is so finely tuned as to be invisible. Nothing distracts us from the penetrating clarity of her vision. We are all in.
Campbell’s methods are exacting. After conceiving a design in her head, she draws the image on a block of marine plywood before incising the lines with a motorised engraving tool. She then paints in the picture with layers of watercolour, quite densely in parts, and finally, painstakingly handprints a single reverse impression on etching paper. This time-intensive series of techniques, developed with her printmaking teacher Leonard Matkevich while at East Sydney Technical College (now the National Art School) in the late 1970s and honed over decades, currently limits Campbell’s production to about five works a year. She stopped making editioned prints, which required her to repaint the block for each impression, in the late 1980s.
Derived from Japanese woodblock printmaking, which she learnt at East Sydney Tech and later at the Yoshida Hanga Academy in Tokyo, Campbell’s distinctive approach melds painting and printmaking. Unlike the traditional method, which employs multiple blocks – one for each colour plus a key-block for the outline – Campbell paints all the colours on a single block. This step alone can take weeks.
Campbell’s work, especially her earlier pictures, reveal an affinity for the compositional techniques of ukiyo-e prints, including bold, unmodulated colour, areas of empty space, asymmetry, cropping and flat perspective. Over the years her graphic style evolved to become more granular and painterly, spacious and luminous. It is also more introspective, in part due to her careful calibration of light and shadow, augmented by reflections from windows and mirrors.
The NGA’s first summer show devoted to a living Australian artist packs in some 140 works made over four decades. Arranged thematically, the pictures glow against the subtle sequence of dark wall colours selected by Campbell. In Still life, the first of six galleries, we find a pile of dishes, pots, cups and utensils drying on a rack. Dining tables replete with oysters, grapes, plates and glasses are observed from above, recalling the “breakfast pieces” of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish artists by way of Cézanne and Margaret Preston. A white-framed tondo hung high shows four white shelves laden with celadon, blue and white, and lacquerware.
The next room – Journey around my house – includes interiors of the Bronte weatherboard cottage she shares with her husband, the fine art and photographic printer Warren Macris, whom she married this year. Her first husband, the film critic Peter Crayford, whom she met in the early 1980s, died in 2011. Several incorporate ukiyo-e prints from her own collection are set behind vases of flowers or wintersweet branches. The verandah (1987), a stylised depiction of a friend’s outdoor area viewed from one end, is reminiscent of linear perspective as taken up by ukiyo-e artists such as Okumura Masanobu. Campbell’s woodblock jives with his famous Enjoying the Evening Cool by Ryōgoku Bridge (c. 1745), even sharing the same palette of mustard, brown and black.
Campbell’s images contain signs of life – a coffee pot, an open book, an iron, a cat – yet are almost always devoid of figures, except when she’s reproducing the art on her walls. In the paired woodblock and print Otto on the stairs (2016-17), a dark brown handrail guides the eye through the picture while providing a sense of palpable space, threatening to outshine the titular feline. Interior with mirrors (2018) places a (possibly different) cat on a chair alongside two empty seats beneath four mirrors and a central heating duct. These sombre yet stunning works both acknowledge and subvert the conventions of the interior portrait, a booming genre in 19th-century Europe, as well as the moody interiors of Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi.
A dazzling series of seven woodblocks in tondo format detailing mostly corner spaces in her home includes Bedroom nocturne (2022), recently acquired by the gallery. This oblique view of a section of Campbell’s bedroom is centred by a rice paper lamp, around which can be seen a bedside table, a diagonal section of a rumpled, unmade bed, an ebonised Regency chair, plantation shutters and a wall hung with art. Not only does this picture give nuanced visual expression to the balancing act we all play in attempting to maintain order in the face of encroaching chaos, it also features an unmade bed you actually want to look at.
The following room focuses on Campbell’s sharp eye for nature with images of blooms, cuttings and plants. Here we find flowering palm groves in Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden and a vegetable patch enclosed by chicken wire. A jewel-like woodblock sets several branches of port wine magnolia against the sky. In another pairing, Lotus (2019), the block has an embroidered, velvety quality, while remarkable variations in the print’s mottled texture help give form to leaf, stalk, petal and stamen.
The gallery titled Studio includes four self-portraits from 1983 and 1988 – three acrylic paintings and one print – that make much of Campbell’s droll stare and curly red hair, and give Christian Schad vibes. Elsewhere are pictures of studios she has worked in and the homes of friends, including the superb four-panel woodblock Interior with poppies (Margaret Olley’s house)(1994). A display case contains piles of spent tubes of Winsor & Newton’s Cotman watercolour, plus the sponges, lino rollers and thicket of minute sable brushes Campbell uses to make her work. A charming short film sees the artist discuss her life, art and technique – that dry humour again.
The works in the final two rooms – Bushland and Waterways – are dazzling in variety and scale, including a panoramic woodblock triptych and a unique print, West of Observatory Hill (1989), each more than three-and-a-half-metres wide and 60 centimetres in height. Sydney Harbour triptych (1998) makes something special of the familiar vista from the Cahill Expressway, possibly because both the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House have been cropped and the boats are vintage. And the sublime print Flannel flowers (2013), which she began while Crayford was dying, draws on van Gogh’s Almond Blossom (1890) to transmit a powerful spiritual impulse.
Campbell has exceptional creative and technical skills, coupled with the discipline to remain committed to her practice despite multiple tragedies – the deaths from cancer of her father in 1982, Crayford in 2011, and her brother, Patrick, in 2020, as well as her beloved mother’s passing in 2018. In 2020 Campbell suffered a brain abscess that required two operations and left her temporarily paralysed. Although she has recovered, the abscess triggered epilepsy.
This consistently delightful exhibition reveals an artist in full command, a fact her collectors have long known but that public institutions have been slow to acknowledge. Of the works on display, three-quarters are from private or corporate lenders and comprise most of her best woodblocks and prints.
Campbell’s pictures are indices of experience, distillations of a life spent looking. Their meaning and value reside in the unflinching precision and sustained focus required to bring them into this world and how they in turn sharpen and enhance the way we see the world around us.
Cressida Campbell is showing at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, until February 19, 2023.
VISUAL ART Leila Jeffreys: The wound is the place where the light enters
Olsen Gallery, Sydney, October 12-29
EXHIBITION Tania Ferrier: Pop Porn
Fremantle Arts Centre, until October 23
Home of the Arts, Gold Coast, October 13-15
MUSIC Melbourne International Jazz Festival
Venues throughout Melbourne, October 14-23
PERFORMANCE Project 4: Justene Williams Victory over the Sun
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, October 14-15
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, until October 9
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 8, 2022 as "A life of intimate harmony".
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Tony Magnusson is a Sydney-based writer and curator.
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