Cressida is a worthy chip off the old Japanese (wood)block

Cressida Campbell’s work seems to represent an intimately and thoroughly familiar environment.

Port wine magnolia 2017 unique woodblock print by Cressida Campbell. Image supplied.

The world we encounter in art is always one transformed by the imagination and vision of the artist: in some cases the simplifications, stylisations or express­ionistic distortions are obvious; in others they are more subtle, even elusive. Cressida Campbell’s work is particularly enigmatic in this way for her pictures, mostly of domestic interiors, seem to represent an intimately and thoroughly familiar environment.

The images are calm and ­impassive, attentive to the accurate depiction of each element in the composition, however humble. The artist seems to efface herself, avoiding any direct inter­vention of overtly expressive marks, discordant compositional effects or dramatic use of colour and light. The work is contemplative and draws the viewer into an absorbing stillness.

This is indeed a world transformed, but here the transformation, the profound artifice, is all in depth. And it is for this reason that Campbell’s work has gone practically unnoticed by the contemporary art establishment: it doesn’t make shrill claims to formal innovation and it doesn’t chatter about ideology. Consequently you will virtually never meet with her pictures in any of the many and always predictable surveys of official contemporary art, but the present exhibition was sold out well before opening ­because she has long been keenly appreciated by private collectors.

As always, meaning arises from the artist’s process. Campbell is ­inspired by the tradition of Japanese woodblock printing, with its flat but graded fields of water­colour pigment, because the ­medium balances descriptive and narrative detail with a formal simplification that lends itself to a cool, impersonal vision and a semi-abstract decorative patterning of colour.

Campbell, however, has adapted the Japanese medium for her own purposes. Whereas the traditional ukiyo-e print is made by using a key-block for the black and white outlines as well as a separate block for each colour ­employed in the composition, she works on a single sheet of marine plywood. On this she draws her motifs in pencil, and indeed the exhibition includes eight pieces left at this stage — lacking her familiar richness of colour but­ ­juxtaposing the strong pencil draughtsmanship that is lost in the full process with the adventitious grain of the wood panel.

Otto on the stairs 2016-17 unique woodblock print by Cressida Campbell. Image supplied.

The drawing is normally followed by cutting out the lines with a woodcutting blade or gouge, so the pencil lines are replaced by fine grooves separating the colour fields and helping to imbue the image, however realistically painted, with an artificial, mosaic-like quality.

The woodblock is then painted in watercolour, not in single or even merely graded hues but complex and thick scumblings of pigment forming rich yet ­restrained harmonies. When the painting is finished, it is sprayed with water to rewet the paint surface and a single paper print — ­reversing the original composition as always — is taken.

Print and block form a pair of images that are superficially identical, yet different not only in being mirror images but also in subtle but ­important qualities of materiality and surface.

Campbell’s process, with its palpable slowness and patience, and its almost ascetic denial of the multiple vocation of the print ­medium — since as we have seen it essentially results in a monoprint together with its block — produces images that are at once intimate and impersonal, ego-less yet engaging. That same sensibility, though grounded in the practice of her ­print­making, is also expressed in her subjects.

Most of the images are of her own house, her own familiar environment, elegant, simple and filled with memories of earlier years. The sensibility is inward and meditative, dwelling lovingly on the colours and textures of familiar things, from upholstery fabrics to banisters that borrow their grain from the plywood block. At the same time, that ­inwardness is qualified by ­glimpses of the outside world, seen through a door opening from the gentle ambience of the inside on to the brighter light of a courtyard or pathway. Flowers and plants, like the trailing maidenhair or ginkgo leaves, bring the living forms of nature into the house, to be set against the artificial shapes of glass and ceramics.

In one case, there is an elaborate nocturne: the living room is lit by two table lamps, and as it is dark outside, lamps and furniture are reflected in the mirroring glass of the window. The interior is thus doubled, though dimly as in the recollections of memory.

But ­because the lamps are low and the ceiling is high, the upper part of the window pane is dark and so becomes transparent again. The garden outside reappears, with the tops of tall bamboos: Campbell’s world is inward and artificial, ­patiently handmade and poetic reconfigured, but it is not solipsistic.

The meditative interiority of her art is nourished and renewed by the love, curiosity and care with which she studies the world ­beyond the self.

Cressida Campbell at Philip Bacon Galleries. Mossgreen, Sydney. Until October 28.