February 23 - Cressida Campbell

I listened to an interview with Cressida Campbell by Richard Fidler. I saw her work at a gallery in Brisbane last year and I was inspired to try something like it. Needless to say, I haven't done anything about it yet but I'm just about to be reinspired as the latest exhibition of her work is about to commence at the QUT Art gallery.

She said that she likes to work every day and loves it because it relaxes her. In her work she combines painting and printing and the process she's worked out suits her well.

She starts a piece by doing a line drawing on the block, which is a sheet of plywood. She then uses a high-tech engraving tool to carve out the lines and thinks about the colours as she does this. Although the line drawing has usually been done from a real-life setting, she paints the colours onto it in the studio so they are not the actual colours. The idea in doing it this way is to transform the image into something a bit different from the real scene. She adds tension to the work in some way and Margaret Ollie describes this as being like adding a bit of the artist's handwriting.

The next part of the process is to add colour using a fine sable brush. She applies two thick coats of watercolour paint. This done, and while it is still wet, she sprays it with water and puts a dampened piece of watercolour paper over the image. It is then rolled to transfer the image onto the paper.

The process sounds simple and, by itself, it seems to be so. However, the detail that she achieves in her work is just astonishing. Cressida's artistry is the result of devising a process that works successfully every time and applying it with extraordinary skill, patience and creativity.

A major influence for her work was Japanese woodblock prints and she spent some time there studying the process. Her work is more about painting than printing, however, as all the colours are on the same block, while Japanese printing uses a different block for each colour.

The work takes a long time to do. Sometimes she can multiprocess but other times she has to give it her total concentration. She commented that when she consciously tries to experiment it doesn't work as well as when she works intuitively.

When Cressida was a child she was a collector and started with stamps becasue they were like visual art galleries. Then she collected shells, especially from a particular rock pool. She tells a lovely story about how her mother would buy shells from somewhere else in the world and plant them in the rock pool for Cressida to find. When she discovered they weren't local her mother would make up some fanastic story about how they came to be there. Cressida believed her and only found out the truth of this about 8 years ago. Her mother was obviously creative and imaginative and no doubt influenced Cressida's own creativity.

The book of her work is a beautiful piece of work in itself and the first edition sold out quickly. When it was being printed Cressida monitored the process carefully to make sure the colours were accurate. The printing house had a place where she could sleep between colour runs so then every hour and a half she'd be woken up to check the colours and allow it to continue.

Her husband coproduced the book with her.

I'd like to think that the page in my book about this will include my own version of a Cressida Campbell print but, given that I'm already WAY behind with my book, then the likelihood is close to zero. I'll put in something of Cressida's instead, I think.