Cressida Campbell
Born: 1960 , Australia
Biography/General
Cressida Campbell is a Sydney-based artist who works in watercolour, painted woodblocks and woodblock prints. Her work, which follows in the tradition of Margaret Preston, is renowned for its beautiful and poetic depictions of everyday domestic scenes, landscapes and still lifes. Campbell was born in 1960 and studied at East Sydney Technical College from 1978-1979 followed by a year of study at the Yoshida Hanga Academy in Tokyo, Japan. Drawing upon the tradition of Japanese woodblock printmaking, Campbell skillfully combines colour, texture and composition to create artworks of intense harmony and sensitivity. Often taking up to two months to complete just one work, her technique is painstaking: first she draws a scene from life onto a wooden block, carves out the details of the image, then paints segments of the block with layers of watercolour paint, before spraying the final object with water and taking a single print.
Campbell has held over 17 solo exhibitions and is represented in numerous Australian museum and gallery collections. In 2009 a major exhibition of her work, Timeless: The art of Cressida Campbell was held at the S.H. Ervin Gallery, and subsequently toured to the Queensland University of Technology Art Museum. Campbell is represented by Rex Irwin Art Dealer in Sydney and Phillip Bacon Galleries in Brisbane.