CRAYFORD, Peter (ed.; intro. John McDonald; foreword Edmund Capon; catalogue raisonné Brett Stone). The Woodblock Painting of Cressida Campbell. Sydney: Public Pictures, 2008.

Large Quarto. Original cloth boards. Original unclipped dust jacket. 360 pp. Numerous colour illustrations throughout. First edition, first printing (standard trade issue; a separate limited edition of 99 numbered and signed copies was also produced).

Cressida Campbell AM (b. 1960) is, by any reasonable measure, one of the most significant and most commercially successful living Australian artists. Born in Sydney, she studied at East Sydney Technical College — now the National Art School — before travelling to Tokyo in 1985 to study at the Yoshida Hanga Academy, an experience that exposed her directly to the tradition of Japanese ukiyo-e printmaking and the work of masters such as Kitagawa Utamaro. What she developed from that training, refined over the following decades in her home studio in Bronte, is a technique unlike that of any other artist working today: drawing directly onto a plywood board, incising the design with a fine engraving tool resembling a dentist's drill, painting the incised block in layers of watercolour over a period that can extend to months, and then producing, through a single delicate hand-printing process, one mirror-image impression on paper — leaving behind two related but distinct original artworks, the painted woodblock itself and its unique paper print, neither reproducible in any second impression.

This laborious, singular method places Campbell in direct lineage with earlier Sydney colourists — Margaret Preston, Grace Cossington Smith, and her own close friend Margaret Olley, for whose home and life Campbell created an entire suite of painted woodblocks — while remaining entirely her own invention. Her subjects are resolutely domestic and unshowy: a kitchen shelf, a bowl of persimmons, the view from her own studio window, the harbour glimpsed through trees — rendered with a precision of design and a richness of colour that curator Sarina Noordhuis-Fairfax has compared, in the same breath, to Matisse and Rembrandt. Campbell's works have sold at auction for over half a million dollars, making her one of the most expensive living Australian artists working today, and one of her woodblocks achieved the highest price ever recorded at auction for a living Australian woman artist in 2022 — the same year the National Gallery of Australia mounted its major retrospective Cressida Campbell, its first summer blockbuster exhibition dedicated to an Australian woman artist, drawing more than 140 works and record attendance. Campbell was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 2024 for significant service to the visual arts.

This monograph, published in 2008 and surveying twenty-five years of Campbell's career from 1984 onward, predates that landmark national recognition by fourteen years, capturing the artist at a formative mid-career point through the lens of those who knew her work best: edited by Peter Crayford, Campbell's husband from 1991 and himself a significant figure in Australian publishing; with an introduction by John McDonald, art critic of the Sydney Morning Herald; a foreword by Edmund Capon, the long-serving and much-admired director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales; and a full catalogue raisonné compiled by Brett Stone. Nearly three hundred images are assembled across nine thematic sections, allowing — in keeping with the sensibility of the artist herself — the pictures to speak substantially for themselves.

Near fine. Copy is clean, fresh, and bright. Very minor rubbing on dust jacket extremities. Very minor foxing at some points of textblock edges. Otherwise, presents wonderfully.

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Catalogue Number: HH000063