Cressida Campbell's 2009 work The kitchen shelf is a 4.2-metre-long watercolour on plywood which is an exact replica of the kitchen shelf in her Sydney home.
It perfectly encapsulates what people love about her work - extraordinary colours and detail, the ability to elevate the ordinary to the beautiful (a leek on display here; nasturtium flowers in a vase there), a sense of celebrating the domestic (the carefully curated display of ceramics and plants is just above the kitchen taps).
In that painting, you can feel the absolute joy she experienced seeing those objects in her home every day, each one providing an opportunity to stop for a moment and enjoy the reverie. The work is just a truly lovely thing to see and appreciate.
It's wonderful, then, that The kitchen shelf, plays such a prominent part in a new landmark exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, called, simply, Cressida Campbell, which opens next week, celebrating her life's work over more than 40 years - and counting.
As part of the celebrations, Campbell's husband Warren Macris, a master fine-art printer, photographed The kitchen shelf and then blew it up to a massive 30 metres by 5.3 metres.
The enormous print is now wrapped around one of the soaring walls leading into the exhibition, immediately drawing visitors into the beauty of Campbell's world.
A couple of weeks before the exhibition opened, the print was being pasted to the wall, technicians working quickly up and down a scissor lift, as Campbell was busy putting the final touches to the exhibition. It will feature more than 140 woodblock paintings and woodcut prints, as well as archival material such as childhood paintings, pieces from her art school days and family stories, all emphasising the autobiographical nature of her work.
Campbell, 62, has had retrospective exhibitions before, but nothing so vast. And there are also some very contemporary works in the exhibition, the final piece still being finished just days before the opening.
"It's a huge honour as you can imagine," she says, of being recognised in such a way by the gallery.
"It's just amazing because I don't think there's been any other woman living contemporary artist that has had this scale [of exhibition]. So it's wonderful on all kinds of levels."
Cressida Campbell is a Know My Name project, the gallery's initiative to celebrate women artists. But plenty of people already know her name, as evidenced by the artworks in the exhibition that have been borrowed from private collectors, of which there are many.
Curator Dr Sarina Noordhuis-Fairfax says the attraction of her work is obvious.
"People do tend to use 'beautiful' as the first adjective and I can't really argue with it," she says.
"It's also meticulous, incredibly detailed. And surprising, I think.
"I know with a lot of her works, there is this classic sort of arrangement, she's got an incredible eye for design and composition. But some of the things she notices are maybe some of the things many of us would overlook and then she finds the unexpected beauty in it all."
The works on show range from intimate interior views through to panoramic coastal landscapes.
"There's a lot of works in a domestic setting and they do feel familiar to a lot of us," Noordhuis-Fairfax says.
"But there's also, hopefully, a lot of things that people will be surprised by. There's a lot of landscape works, beautiful bushland scenes from all the works she's done around Sydney and also a lot of works around Sydney Harbour and other waterways
"So people tend to have a kind of genre that they might associate her with, but she's actually worked across most genres - still life, landscapes, portraiture, interiors and so on."
Campbell's exacting attention to detail was obvious in the preparations for the exhibition as she moved ceramic pieces back and forth on a table, placing them just so. It's here visitors, inspired by her work, will be able sit and do their own still life drawing as part of the exhibition. Many of the pieces on display are from her own collection from home, including ceramics she has collected from south-east Asia and China.
Campbell also asked for the walls on which her works are displayed in the National Gallery to be repainted, in various shades of blues and charcoals, eschewing plain white. The result is a meander through soothing spaces, against which her prints and paintings can sing.
"Funnily enough, Margaret Olley, who was a great friend of mine, used to say, 'Pictures always look better on darker walls'," she says.
Noordhuis-Fairfax welcomed the input from the artist as they worked to bring the exhibition to life.
"We don't tend to work with a lot of contemporary artists on this kind of scale. Having access and being able to ask her things and put ideas to her, she was excited and on board straight away," Noordhuis-Fairfax says.
"She's also laid out all her childhood works and art school works the way she wants them. So, there's just all these little moments where, it's her. We'll have things in the audio guide, she'll be telling stories about different works. And all the little extended labels, they're all 100 per cent quotes from her."
Campbell was born in Sydney in 1960 to parents who were both journalists. Her father Ross Campbell wrote a newspaper column about the family, making up names for the four children - Theodora for Sally, Lancelot for Patrick, Baby Pip for Cressida and Little Nell for Laura. Nell/Laura Campbell would go on to take her own place in popular culture by starring as Columbia in the 1975 movie The Rocky Horror Picture Show, as well as later running the legendary New York nightclub, Nell's. ("She's about to do her own one-woman show," her sister says. "She's starting in some very fashionable bar in Brunswick Heads." The show is called All's Nell That Ends Nell.)
Cressida studied art at East Technical Sydney College, inspired by Margaret Preston and her use of woodblocks, as well as the Japanese traditional ukiyo-e technique of print making. She made her own version of woodblock painting, using one carved woodprint painted thickly with watercolour and putting it through a press onto paper to produce a single print.
"When I was at East Sydney Tech there was a really good exhibition of Margaret Preston's colour print cuts at the NSW Art Gallery. This is 1978 or '79. It was a real eye-opener. Also, I love plants and she loved plants. And as well as seeing her pictures, her composition, it was really inspiring," Campbell says.
She likes to paint what she sees. "My main inspiration comes from what is directly around me in the house or garden," she says. "I remember combinations of colours I see in houses, pictures, gardens, buildings or sculptures here and round the world."
Campbell's work is undeniably beautiful and she agrees that beauty is underrated in contemporary art. "I do, actually. For the simple reason if you look at all the works of art in history that are adored and remembered, no matter what the subject, sad or serious, they are always visually very sophisticated and still beautiful," she says.
The exhibition at the National Gallery, extending across spring and summer, is a perfect antidote to more than two years of COVID drudgery, the works life-affirming and uplifting. It also marks a move out of the darkness for Campbell who developed a brain abscess in August 2020 "and nearly died".
"I had big brain operations and it was absolutely dreadful. I was paralysed all down one side," she says. "The first operation didn't work, the second one did. It was terrifying. And that was full-on COVID time. Warren proposed to me a week before this happened, on a precipice in the Blue Mountains. The poor man. I mean, talk about being tested."
The couple were married in April at her house. She lost her first husband, the film critic Peter Crayford, who battled Hodgkin's disease, in 2011. Macris and Campbell first met when he did the printing for Peter's wake card. A friendship later developed into a relationship. "We've been together ever since," she says.
And it's just another fabulous part of Campbell's life that she was actually at the opening of the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra in October 1982, the tickets obtained for her by none other than the artist Martin Sharp. Now, 40 years later, she is exhibiting in the gallery in a big-deal retrospective.
"It is amazing," she says, smiling at her journey.
Sarina Noordhuis-Fairfax says it is about time Campbell had her place in the sun.
"As soon as we started putting Cressida's works up, everyone was like, 'Oh my gosh, how hasn't this happened before, on this kind of scale?'," she says.
"She's so beloved by so many people. I think some people will know her work but won't necessarily know who the artist is and this is just a really great thing the gallery can do, the way that they've done with other women artists in the past, like Margaret Preston. That's how you become a household name when you have a big institution backing you. And I think Cressida is at the top of her career.
When asked what she hopes her legacy might be, Campbell answers in a characteristically down-to-earth way. "Oh God, if anyone gets any pleasure or interest out of anything I've done, basically, you really can't ask for more than that. Interest in any way. Whether that's reminding them of someone or it makes them happy, any reaction - if it means something to them."
- Cressida Campbell, National Gallery of Australia, September 24 - February 19.
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