Cressida Campbell - a brilliant Australian artist you’ve never heard of
Cressida Campbell is an artist worth knowing about (and admiring) if you love detailed artworks which blur the line between truth and fiction. Campbell, b. 1960, is an Australian artist who trained at what is now the National Art School, but what was then the East Sydney Technical College. She also studied in Tokyo at the Yoshida Hanga Academy. I specify these biographical details because Campbell adapts a very interesting technique of woodblock printing, often prioritising the woodblock and not the print as the final artwork.
Each artwork is carved from a piece of plywood using a small engraving tool after a detailed drawing straight onto the wood. After the carving is complete watercolour paint is applied, in two layers, to each area, the colour is freshened up and a single impression is made - a mirror image of the carving. Campbell takes as her subject matter objects of everyday life from still life compositions, street scenes to landscapes depicting the Australian bush. The focus is on pattern, colour and the harmony of composition - these carvings appear deceptively simple but contain months of work and dedication. The process I imagine is meditative, and I’ve felt a stillness when viewing them in person. For Dr Janet McKenzie they depict a private and harmonious world -
Campbell’s subjects, such as a pile of washing up, speckled fruit with textures of skin-like subtlety, Chinese famille rose bowls, jugs and vases of flowers, and other household trivia, are taken from the real world around her without pretence or artifice, and transformed in her paintings and prints into compositions of enduring human values and certainty.
Glasses of water with lemon
2009
Watercolour paint on plywood
20 x 20cm
Image: courtesy Sophie Gannon Gallery
In her own words, the artist describes her subject matter:
People take them for granted, but they’re often the things that are actually well-designed and have an interesting line to draw. It gives a freedom for design and colour that is exciting.
John McDonald notes the decorative nature of these artworks suggesting that they follow the tradition of Pierre Bonnard or Henri Matisse. McDonald posits that art as decoration has received a bad name in recent years, and rightly observes, in my opinion that Campbell is -
an artist devoted to the data of everyday life, not the grand classical themes. But such a distinction no longer applies to contemporary art: an arena in which the grandest themes are often allied with the blandest execution.
While the accusation that contemporary art contains bland execution and grand themes is only half true I disagree that it cannot equally represent our world. As an aside - it is important to look at art in its historical context. We have to ask, following McDonald’s example, why art seeks the grandest themes in mundane objects? This is a fairly subjective question.
Oysters
1994
Woodblock print
38.5 x 59cm
Image: courtesy Sophie Gannon Gallery
So we should acknowledge that artists have also returned to ancient techniques to produce work that avoids grand narratives, such as the work of Campbell does. She is not on the trail of the “sublime in the everyday” as Magdalena Bors is (who has been discussed previously on this blog) though this is an approach which I find equally fascinating. More than any other time in art history the sheer diversity of styles and approaches, the absence of coherent movements, defines the way we look at art. It is pointless to suggest that something is more valid than something else, each has a purpose and our responses become more and more personalised in the absence of a reference point.
Campbell focuses on the intimacy of the everyday. Her work has been compared with that of Margaret Olley and Margaret Preston, two important female Australian artists. Olley’s house appeared in one of Campbell’s woodblocks too (pictured below). Olley has been described as perhaps Campbell’s biggest fan as well as a mentor and friend.
Interior, Margaret Olley’s house
1992
Woodblock or woodblock print
Image: courtesy Cressida Campbell’s website.
I would emphasise the experience of looking at the prints and woodblocks, there is something special about being in the presence of a finely crafted object. I think this is one of the reasons for Campbell’s popularity - though her name may not be well known in Australia her exhibitions are sold out, sometimes before they ‘hit the walls’ (as Kerry O’Brien noted on the 7:30 Report).
Audiences appreciate something in these artworks which cannot be experienced from other contemporary artworks, but we’ll each have a different idea of what this might be. For Olley it is the time, craftsmanship and colour which goes into each woodblock -
A lot of the young people think ‘toss it off overnight and it’s done’, and it looks like it, and they’re doing what I call poverty of the mind. So it’s very refreshing to see what Cressida does.
These sentiments are shared by McDonald and others who I think respond to two aspects of Campbell’s work. Firstly, the detail, the pursuit of a life-life appearance (with slight but necessary stylisation in the process of carving and colouration), and secondly, the effort involved, it is time consuming and requires the kind of skill which (I think McDonald finds) is absent in some contemporary art.
From my perspective, I can recall clearly standing in front of Campbell’s woodblock’s at the opening of her 2009 QUT Art Museum retrospective in Brisbane, and feeling meditative. The images are so clear and harmonious the viewer has to spend time with them. Campbell’s images reward serious investigation with subtle details from life, but they leave us tantalised by a world which is almost fiction, almost too good to be true and certainly one we’ll want to visit time and again.
The wildly successful book titled The Woodblock Painting of Cressida Campbell is available in its third print run. In Melbourne, see Brunswick Street Bookstore also available from the artist’s website.
Gerberas and tarragon
2009
Watercolour paint on stonehenge paper
24.5 x 45cm
Image: courtesy Sophie Gannon Gallery
Olive oil and fennel
Watercolour paint on stonehenge paper
47.5 x 42cm
Image: courtesy Sophie Gannon Gallery
