Artist Cressida Campbell on miraculous recovery from brain abscess
After a brain abscess almost ended her life, artist Cressida Campbell is celebrating a marriage and her biggest ever exhibition.
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Cressida Campbell is a national treasure, her work hung proudly in the National Gallery of Australia and sold to passionate collectors for hundreds of thousands of dollars – but she has had two years of the highest of highs and the lowest of lows.
In August 2020, the 62-year-old, Bronte-based painter found out she had a life-threatening brain abscess that paralysed the right side of her body, which she uses to paint, and required two brain operations.
This left her with a type of epilepsy, which is “quite a bore”, and the terrifying notion that perhaps her career as an artist was over.
It was a week after her acclaimed photographer husband Warren Macris had proposed, and she was having a cocktail. She dropped the glass, and when her right hand started to shake, she knew something was wrong.
“Funnily enough, I was painting and all of a sudden I had a feeling at the back of my right hand, like someone had just quietly stroked me with a seagull’s feather,” she explains.
“And then it happened the next day and I thought it was a bit odd. And the next day I thought I’d have a cocktail because Warren had proposed to me … and then I dropped the cocktail glass, but I didn’t really think about it.
“And then the next day my hands started shaking really badly and I knew something was really wrong.
“It was a very strange experience – the last few years have really been an incredible mixture of amazing and bad.”
In a matter of six days, the abscess had grown from the size of a grape to the size of a lemon. It was a one in a million thing, she was told.
“It was really bad and it happened very quickly,” Campbell says.
“So I said to Warren ‘Look, God, you don’t have to (go through with the wedding)’ as I thought I would be paralysed – but I was just incredibly lucky.
“It was fascinating but terrifying.”
They married in April this year and it was wonderful, she says with a smile. One of the highs, along with her miraculous one in a million recovery.
Also among the amazing was having her life’s work celebrated by the National Gallery of Australia, with the acquisition of new work Bedroom nocturne, 2022, in her biggest ever exhibition, which is showing in the nation’s capital until February.
It has opened to great acclaim – and it’s easy to see why.
Campbell has been making art for more than 40 years, and in sales alone, is one of Australia’s most successful and sought-after artists.
Her commercial shows typically sell out, often before opening – but this is the first time a retrospective of this scale has been mounted by a major Australian gallery.
Featuring more than 140 of her woodcut prints and woodblock paintings that span from her earliest to newest works, the show invites people on a journey into the artist’s home and life, with her largest exhibition to date being very personal in nature, with paintings depicting her own home.
“It’s a huge privilege,” she says.
“I mean, my work is very autobiographical.
“I don’t leave the house much – in the past I did leave the house more – so I do think it is very personal, and I think people react to that intimacy in a way that they may not react to something that is more distant.
“People do seem to be responding to it a lot, I think, partly because I make things that people take for granted into beautiful objects, it’s something that people actually find interesting.
“There’s a lot of work out there at the moment that is very … angry. Mind you, I don’t really care about that.
“You’ve got to get the person who is watching the picture interested in looking at it.
“There’s no point in having a picture that people aren’t interested in looking at, so often it’s a combination of the subject and making the pictures as interesting to look at as possible.”
A renowned colourist whose work blends printmaking and painting, Campbell’s four-decade career demonstrates her ability to blur the boundary between art and life as she translates the everyday into the extraordinary.
Acquired to mark the Gallery’s 40th anniversary – she attended the opening along with the Queen on October 12, 1982 – the woodblock painting Bedroom nocturne is considered a breakthrough moment in Campbell’s work.
Created using a circular composition, she offers an intimate night-time view of the bedroom the newlywed shares with Warren.
With many of Campbell’s sought-after painted woodblocks and single-edition woodcut prints held in private collections, the show gives audiences a rare chance to see works that have been off public display for decades.
Campbell has been painting since she was young, her fondest memories being with her mother at Greenwich where she grew up, loving the industrial shapes of the Shell Terminal, an oil refinery site to the eastern side of the Greenwich Peninsula.
“I loved drawing as a child, that’s why I put a few of the doll pictures in the show,” she says.
“And then when I was doing the early woodblocks, they were much more simplified, and then they got slightly more detailed, and then more and more detailed, so they definitely changed as time went on.
“But then I became more and more interested in interiors and I started collecting ceramics and my first husband and I loved growing plants, so there’s a bit of everything really.
“But I think at the moment I’ve been doing a lot of interiors and they’ve been a bit moody … and they’ve been interesting compositionally.
“Because if you do a round picture, it’s quite interesting because the straight lines cut the picture … so it’s a constant challenge, trying to keep on learning, exploring.
“My father was a writer and my mother used to help him refine his writing … I was very close to my mother and she used to help me try and work out what would make (my paintings) look better.
“But now she’s gone so I just do it myself and it’s always interesting – you’ve just got to keep on refining.”
While her art is admired by the world, painting and creating is something she does purely for herself. And in her own home, it’s other people’s work she likes to admire.
“When my mother died, she left me all the pictures in the house,” she says.
“I do like looking at other people’s work and putting it in my work, and I collect a lot of ceramics, so they are there in the pictures – but you’ve got to design the picture to fit them in.
“Recently I was in Penang and I bought a big bronze cock, a rooster, from Burma, which is amazing and very heavy.
“It’s apparently part of the Chinese calendar someone told me recently, so I might do something with that one day.”
Australian Prints and Drawings curator Sarina Noordhuis-Fairfax says that in documenting her own life, Campbell’s art remains connected to the times in which she lives.
‘The personal nature of her pictures resonates with audiences and offers an overview of the last 40 years of her story,’ she says.
Originally published as Artist Cressida Campbell on miraculous recovery from brain abscess
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