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November 2022
Arts & Letters
A close, careful looking: The work of Cressida Campbell
Detail, Cressida Campbell, Still life with electric fan, 1997, University Art Collection, Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of
Sydney, donated through The Hon RP Meagher Bequest 2011, image courtesy the University Art Collection, Chau Chak Wing
Museum, The University of Sydney © Cressida Campbell
Eileen Chong’s poems are a valuable pathway into Cressida Campbell’s very beautiful but slightly mysterious pictures.
Persimmons crowned with dark stems; their cool skins spotted with the black ink of ripeness. If you could palm each fruit: you’d know they grow heavier on the plate, even as the yearning pink blossoms tumble onto silk.
Yellow and vermillion nasturtiums in three blue and white bowls. If you placed a hand in the water, and lifted it, dripping, to your face?
Cool, fragranced –
An aubergine on a stool, flanked by pale lemons. A large, sturdy fan on the floor, with its swan’s neck. Its buttons, if depressed and released, will sound like clattering beaks.
Campbell’s works are dense with contradictions. They canvass the everyday – zooming in on domestic interiors and still lifes, kitchen utensils and chairs, bowls of fruit and vases of flowers, chairs and textiles, an open book, a glass of wine, a half-hidden cat; and zooming out to broader outdoor vistas of sky and water and local traffic – yet there is something ineffable about them. They are meticulously realistic, but their line and form, composition, colour and cropping lead the brain towards the abstract.
She has preternatural focus. She draws and paints with precision, labours for long hours with woodblocks and engraving drills and other paraphernalia of lithographic technique, with pencils and brushes and watercolours. And yet, she no longer prints each work in numbered runs. Rather, she exhibits each painted woodblock and a single print on paper, uncanny mirror images, finishing five or six works a year.
“Often, in art, we seek to capture an echo or a shadow of the people and the things we love in life,” writes Chong, the Singapore-born Sydney-based poet, by way of introduction to her essay in the catalogue of Campbell’s recently opened exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia. It is the first major exhibition of Campbell’s work anywhere in the country, though she is, quietly, a favourite with art collectors and commands prices to match. Of the more than 140 woodblocks and printed images adorning the walls of the NGA at the moment, 110 of them are on private loan. That is the highest percentage of private loans in any of the gallery’s exhibitions to date, according to director Nick Mitzevich. Only the Art Gallery of NSW and QAGOMA have held her works – nine and one respectively – until now. One of the works in this current exhibition – Bedroom nocturne, hot off the printing block for the show and made in the circular shape Campbell has occasionally been using of late – has been bought by the NGA.
It is also the first major summer exhibition of a living artist at the gallery, timed to fit into its ongoing Know Her Name project, a program in keeping with the dispassionate examination by state galleries around Australia and the world of the inequality that exists. That accounts for no special pleading here, but has brought Campbell the attention she deserves.
Chong writes: “Paintings, like poems, bend time and dimension – they expand beyond the limits of their craft to draw upon the sense of the person engaging with the work. A work of art is a work of co-creation, of a meeting of minds. It is only with close careful looking, of feeling over time that a painting unfolds its meanings to you, beyond shapes and form, beyond colour and ink on paper.”
The Canberra show is divided by theme: still life, interiors, plants, studio, bushland and water views. There are also several prints of the artist herself, all curling red hair and grumpy expression, and a roomful of childhood memorabilia. At first glance her pieces seem similar, but step closer and a vast range of tonality and mood is revealed. Take the elegance of Still life with dragon fly (2016–2017). Almost square at 68 by 75 centimetres, in stretches of black and creamy white with a splash of purple, it contains a golden-bodied dragonfly with fine lacy wings moving from a spiderweb towards a magnolia flower that hangs from a plate and a mug both half disappearing off the edge of the picture. The Sydney Harbour triptych (1998), by contrast, 50 centimetres deep by 366 centimetres wide, is a survey of pale blue water and sky, with the bridge and the Opera House and boats and North Shore houses exactly where they should be: the result is in no way photographic, however, but dense with texture.
Her landscapes of Newcastle range from a wide survey in 1988 to a smaller-scale series from 2007, again containing sea and sky and blocks of flats and hints of a once busy harbour. Another print shows part of Campbell’s cabinet of collected seashells, made more delicate by the transparency of the glass shelves that support them. There are rooms and balconies of clearly much-loved houses, and many carefully composed groupings of small household objects: plates and cups and glasses; hammers and pliers and saws. Her depiction of tugboats is a kind of abstract realism; her gardens jump the senses to exude scent and subtropical freshness.
Campbell is a master colourist who can spend weeks layering watercolour on her woodcuts with fine sable brushes. Then she goes over them again when the picture is finished, even printed. And yet, despite the artistic sophistication that immediately draws the trained eye, her works are immediately accessible to the untrained eye as well. People will be drawn to the one great picture in a roomful of boring canvases, she pointed out to journalist Susan Wyndham: “You don’t have to be some kind of intellectual genius to respond visually.”
One has to trawl the annals of art history to find similar significance lent to pictures of ordinary objects. And, no, in earlier times, they weren’t seen as “feminine”. While small-scale subject matter was increasingly corralled into women’s work in the 19th century, as more women began earning a living from art, going back much further we have startlingly different feminine examples. Artemisia Gentileschi, she of the blood-drenched c.1620 painting Judith Slaying Holofernes, for example, went through a full apprenticeship in her father’s studio, though her sex denied her membership of his guild. She was eventually made a member of the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence and worked professionally there. Women such as Clara Peeters and Judith Leyster were successful, professional painters in the same era, when still lifes and domestic interiors were also valued in the Dutch Golden Age and seen as gender-neutral. Only now, are those great names re-emerging.
And yet, it takes time for deeply embedded tropes to fade. At the time of the show’s opening, even NGA curator Sarina Noordhuis-Fairfax, who has made a beautiful job of the exhibition’s layout against wall colours chosen by the artist, initially compared Campbell’s work to that of other women artists. “(T)he NGA wants Campbell to be as well known as Clarice Beckett and Margaret Preston, by whom she is influenced,” she said, before expanding on her point. “This is the great work public galleries can do for women in particular. Suddenly you know more than Fred Williams or John Olson. There are incredible women to add to our vocabulary.”
In a 2017 feature examining Campbell’s relative obscurity, at least in the public imagination, Sydney Morning Herald art critic John McDonald dug deep into the commercial interest in her work and found more gender-neutral attitudes overseas. He began by surveying her work on show in Berlin, alongside that of her far more famous fellow-Australian Tim Storrier, in a show called Difficult Pleasures at the Contemporary Fine Arts gallery. The directors of that museum, Bruno Brunnet and Nicole Hackert, were apparently immediately hooked by Campbell’s pictures on a visit to Sydney the previous year.
“It was a vote of confidence such as the artist had rarely received from local curators, who tend to view her as a ‘decorative’ artist,” McDonald wrote. “Brunnet and Hackert, who show stars such as Georg Baselitz, Peter Doig, Cecily Brown, Chris Ofili, Dana Schutz, Sarah Lucas and Daniel Richter, made no such distinction.”
Seeing a Margaret Preston exhibition and an exhibition of ukiyo-e prints opened Campbell’s eyes when she was still a student. But among other influences she cites are Henri Matisse and Giorgio Morandi, brilliant modernist exponents of the art of the still life and domestic interior.
Campbell’s biography has been widely described since the Canberra opening. She was one of journalist Ross Campbell’s four children, whom he wrote about in a witty weekly column that recorded their shenanigans. He used pseudonyms for them and Cressida, the youngest by some years, was called “Little Pip”. Her mother, Ruth, was also journalist and an artist. Her two sisters are Sarah, a textile designer, and Nell, an actor and the proprietor of a famous New York nightclub in the ’80s. The mother and daughter were close – the whole family was – and the two of them would go rambling around their neighbourhoods: the daughter fossicking for seeds and nuts in the forest and shells from the foreshore, her mother occasionally planting more exotic specimens she bought for the purpose in rock pools for Campbell to find. Collecting anything and everything, locally and on her travels, became a lifelong passion. “Another great tip you gave me once is that the eye likes to have a rest,” her sister Nell once said in a conversation recorded for the NGA. “Yes,” Campbell answered wryly, “that’s why I’ve got 4000 images in the house.”
Campbell was always going to be an artist and won prizes for competition entries as a child. She didn’t last long at the Sydney College of the Arts. It was at East Sydney Tech, now with the classier name of the National Art School and still housed in the old Darlinghurst Gaol, that she found her circle and her printmaking teacher, Leonard Matkevich. His mentorship and a grant to study traditional ukiyo-e technique in Japan consolidated her apprenticeship. She retained many of the techniques she had developed herself, however, including laborious hand-printing instead of using a printing press.
Her early years seem idyllic, at least in their public recounting. Her first husband, the film critic Peter Crayford, was her soul mate. The couple’s homes were beautiful, their travels eventful, their wide circle of friends intellectual and intimate. But the exigencies of life intruded. Her beloved father died of cancer in 1982. Later, within a decade she lost her husband to cancer in 2011, her mother at 95 in 2018, and her brother, Patrick, a solar energy scientist, to leukaemia in 2020. She herself suffered a terrifying abscess on the brain in 2020. It caused paralysis down her right side, which eventually subsided though it left her prone to epilepsy.
And yet, at 62, Campbell is finding brighter moments. She and her partner, specialist photographic and fine-art printer Warren Macris, married in April. And the market is certainly rewarding her. At a show in August at her agent Philip Bacon’s gallery, larger pieces were selling for up to $420,000, according to The Sydney Morning Herald. A 1987 work, called The Verandah, recently sold at auction for $515,455. And now there’s the survey of her work at the NGA, which opened in September.
Have changes in her work been a response to darker days, to growing older and more experienced, to the inevitable development of an artist’s vision and technique? Or to accident? The round pictures – tondi, as they were called during the Italian Renaissance – came about because she found some round boards in her local art shop. “I’ve never really liked round pictures, but I am finding these really interesting,” she told her sister in the same recoded conversation. “They’re very good with non-organic shapes. Like, if you’re doing an interior with straight windows and lines that cut the circle, it’s quite interesting.”
Eileen Chong weighs up more parallels between poems and pictures, before considering the questions Campbell’s work poses. “What do we, as artists, choose to record, and what do we choose to crop out of our representations?” she writes. “What do the silences and the absences reveal? Are [readers or viewers] aware that there is a time before, a time during, and a time after the making of art?”
Miriam Cosic
Miriam Cosic is a Sydney-based journalist and author.
Eileen Chong’s poems are a valuable pathway into Cressida Campbell’s very beautiful but slightly mysterious pictures.
Persimmons crowned with dark stems; their cool skins spotted with the black ink of ripeness. If you could palm each fruit: you’d know they grow heavier on the plate, even as the yearning pink blossoms tumble onto silk.
Yellow and vermillion nasturtiums in three blue and white bowls. If you placed a hand in the water, and lifted it, dripping, to your face?
Cool, fragranced –
An aubergine on a stool, flanked by pale lemons. A large, sturdy fan on the floor, with its swan’s neck. Its buttons, if depressed and released, will sound like clattering beaks.
Campbell’s works are dense with contradictions. They canvass the everyday – zooming in on…
November 2022
Issue
November 2022
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From the front page
The makeover: Peter Dutton’s hard sell to the electorate
Salute to the sum
The curious mind of King Charles III
Native foods in the Plate Southern Land
In This Issue
Renewable energy’s power-lines problem
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