At 47, life almost stopped: How this five-time Archibald finalist reinvented his world

When one of Australia’s most successful artists was left partially paralysed by a near-fatal stroke at just 47, many people assumed his career would be over.

It would now be impossible for him to paint the large-scale colourist and abstract canvasses for which he’d become so well-known as a five-time Archibald Prize finalist and with multiple placings in the Wynne and Sulman prizes.

“I never wanted to stop working”: Robert Eadie in his Darlinghurst home.Credit: Nikki Short

But they reckoned without the man himself. Instead, Robert Eadie simply began work on much smaller paintings, with a pad of paper balanced on one knee and pastels held in a now claw-like right hand, at first in black-and-white tones and then later back into a full blaze of colour.

And he worked steadily, intensely; some would even say obsessively.

Part of Robert Eadie’s Harbour Marks seriesCredit:

“I just never wanted to stop working,” Eadie says now, 35 years on from that fateful day when life stood still. “I went from a fit, robust, outgoing bloke to a man who had to find a meaningful internal life to compensate for the loss. I couldn’t go out any more, and I withdrew from the commercial art world, so I had to create a different world for myself.

“I couldn’t work at that large scale any more. So, where previously, I would do small sketches and then embark on the large work; instead, those smaller works became the finished work. But this internalisation gave me the ability to make small work much more meaningful and make sense of my life. Of course, I mourned the man I had been, but this was the compensation.”

Eadie, 82, who’d been a prominent fixture on the Australian art scene from the 1960s to the late 1980s, is now finally making his re-entry into the art world.

With thousands of completed works scattered through every room of his rambling Darlinghurst terrace house to choose from, his first major exhibition in more than a decade, Strange Light, is to take place at The Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf from August 14 to September 1.

The Strange Tree - Light and Snow (detail).Credit:

“I haven’t done a lot of exhibitions over the last 40 years, and I am now looking forward to it,” he says, his slim frame folded into a collapsing armchair, surrounded by a jumble of paintings, sculptures, cane weavings and piles of books. “The most wonderful thing is that my family have all come together to help put it together, which is something that also brings me great joy.”

His three children and grandchild have all been an important part of his art life. The room upstairs, where his granddaughter often sleeps, has two walls filled with 42 small paintings of the faces of all the members of her family and ancestors. “She was sometimes afraid when she was young, so I thought it was good to surround her with the pictures of all the people who love her,” says Eadie.

‘My family have all come together to help which is something that also brings me great joy.’

Robert Eadie

Upstairs in the old house, which was once rented by Jim Devine, the underworld husband of notorious madam, sex worker and sly grog seller Tilly Devine, is Eadie’s studio, a jumble of paints, chalks and works-in-progress. It’s here that he plays music – country music or Bach – as he works for up to eight hours a day.

It’s also where he’s done most of his work, including for group shows like the Biennale of Sydney, Sculpture by the Sea and the Melbourne Sculpture Triennial, and other pieces held by the Art Gallery of NSW and the Art Gallery of Western Australia.

The son of a butcher, Eadie graduated from the nearby National Art School in 1966 and went on to teach there for the next 20 years, latterly as the head of drawing and painting. He was in Canberra as artist-in-residence at the Australian National University when he suffered his stroke.

“I am still just as ambitious for the work, but now when it’s finished, often I’ll just put it under the bed or in the back of the cupboard,” he says. “So this idea of an exhibition is very appealing.”

Strange Light by Robert Eadie, August 14 – September 1, The Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf, 548 New South Head Road, Double Bay.

This article has been edited to reflect the fact Robert Eadie is a five-time Archibald finalist not 12, as previously stated.