Cressida Campbell and Sarina Noordhuis-Fairfax in conversation with Fran Kelly

HEATHER: Yuuma, gurruburri and good afternoon, everyone. It's my great pleasure to welcome you to the National Gallery this afternoon for this very special event featuring Cressida Campbell and Dr Sarina Noordhuis in conversation with Fran Kelly. A very warm welcome also to audiences across the country who are joining us online tonight.

My name is Heather Whitely Robertson. I'm the Tim Fairfax Assistant Director for Learning & Digital here at the National Gallery. This evening I welcomed you in the Ngunnawal greeting ‘Yuuma’ and the Ngambri greeting ‘Gurruburri’. I thank the Ngunnawal and the Ngambri Elders for sharing their beautiful language with us and I also acknowledge that we meet together today on the Ngunnawal and the Ngambri Country here where the National Gallery stands. I pay respects to all First Nations Elders, leaders and artists and particularly also like to acknowledge all First Nations people joining us in the audience tonight.

For blind and low‑vision audiences, I'll now self‑describe. I'm a cis‑gender woman with dark, blonde hair. It's tied back tonight and I'm wearing oval‑shaped glasses that are dark brown and I'm wearing a mid‑length dress that's got an African print with bright reds and yellows.

Tonight's event is held in association with the exhibition 'Cressida Campbell', which presents a substantial career survey of one of Australia's most significant contemporary artists working in painting and printmaking. Combining keen observation with delicacy of line, Campbell's woodblocks, paintings and prints capture the overlooked beauty of the every day. Through her views of a working harbour or burnt bushland, an arrangement of nasturtiums or a plate of ripening persimmons, she celebrates the transitory moments of life.

In celebration of the National Gallery's 40th anniversary this year, we've acquired two of Campbell's major works: 'Bush remnants’ (1986)' and a recent work purchased produced this year, 'Bedroom nocturne’ (2022)'. These works feature in the exhibition and have become a part of the national art collection for all Australians. Tonight, artist and curator will discuss these works.

This exhibition, 'Cressida Campbell', is part of the National Gallery's Know My Name initiative, launched in 2020 to create gender equity, celebrate the diversity of women artists and enhance understanding of the contribution of women to Australia's cultural life. Our panel this evening includes ABC journalist Fran Kelly, presenter of ABC talkshow Frankly, and for more than 15 years presenter of Radio National's Breakfast. We're also joined on stage by the artist, Cressida Campbell, whose major survey show opened here at the National Gallery in September, and Dr Sarina Noordhuis‑Fairfax, curator of the exhibition.

We'll be welcoming your questions throughout the conversation using slido.com, an online Q&A platform. If you're at home, click on the Slido link in the right‑hand corner of your screen. In the theatre, please ensure that your phone is turned to silent and, using the Gallery's free WiFi, head to slido.com and enter the code 'Cressida' to submit your questions. The details are just on screen here on the right ‑ my stage left. Now, I'd like to hand over to Fran Kelly. Thank you, Fran.

FRAN: Thank you very much, Heather. (Applause). And thank you, all of you, for coming out this afternoon. I would also like to acknowledge the Ngunnawal and the Ngambri people, the traditional owners of the land on which we meet. Always was and always will be Aboriginal land. And for those of you joining us online, thank you for joining us. I'd like to extend that respect to the traditional custodians of the land from which you join us tonight.

Before we get started, I will self‑describe for our low‑vision audience and invite both Cressida and Sarina to do the same. My name is Fran. I've been a journalist for 35 years. I've got blonde-ish hair, deep‑set eyes and a ready smile and I'm wearing a bright red shirt this evening. I've been a radio journalist for much of my life so you might recognise the voice. I think that about sums me up. Now, Sarina? Cressida? You go first, Sarina.

SARINA: Sure. So my name's Sarina. I'm the Curator of Australian Prints and Drawings. I am in my sort of mid‑life... (Audience laughs)

FRAN: That was tricky. I left that bit out!

SARINA: I have curly, greying hair and I'm wearing some curatorial black outfit and I think that sums me up.

FRAN: Cressida?

CRESSIDA: I might say Sarina is a lot more ‑ she's downplaying herself. She's a raving beauty with a Flemish face. But I am a redhead by birth and I've got ‑ I'm 62 years old. I have brown eyes that look a little bit almond shaped. I'm wearing a creamy‑coloured silk Indian top that my sister bought ‑ designed from India. I'm also wearing a beautiful fine old batik scarf and black trousers and black espadrilles.

FRAN: And she looks a picture! I'm so excited to be here today, speaking with Cressida and Sarina, the artist and the curator, and for those of you who have been lucky enough to see the exhibition already, you will know that this is really, truly a collaborative ‑ a collaboration of both. The NGA Director, Nick Mitzevich, describes this exhibition as "a journey of beauty" and I think that's an apt description, and an epic journey so far, I would say. So much beauty on the walls. In fact, a friend of mine called me recently and she'd just been to Canberra to see the exhibition and she said, "I felt like falling to my knees, so overwhelming the wonder of Cressida's work, not just the beauty of it and the skill of it, but the enormity of it and the grandeur and the magnificence of the body of work when seen and experienced as a whole", as we do here at the Gallery. The time, the energy, the commitment to the craft, the amount of a lifetime committed to giving us such beauty, it really is quite something. 140 works, each of them lovely to gaze upon. It's like being saturated in loveliness. That's how I felt. The loveliness of everyday life. That's how I feel about it. A little later I will invite questions to find out how you feel about it or what more you would like to know about it. In fact, as Heather mentioned, send the questions in through the conversation so we can perhaps incorporate them through the conversation as we go along using Slido, the online platform.

You know the rest. Put your phone on silent. Please put your phones on silent. And away we go. Cressida, let's start with you. Do you know how good you are? (Audience laughs)

CRESSIDA: Um...well, first of all, the trouble is if you know a lot about the greats, you always know that you're not as good as the greats. So…and that I mean, everyone's got their own tastes, but in my particular tastes, I'm, you know - I know what I certainly don't think ‑ I know that I'm not as good as the greats. But, having said that, there's...I know there's an essence in my work that people respond to and also I've always had the desire to draw and paint and I do think I'm a bit like a bird of prey. I do think I've been interested in looking very sharply for a long ‑ you know, ever since I was six years old. So… And like most serious artists, even though I hate the word “serious”; I mean, there's probably some very good artists who are frivolous… (Audience laughs) But the greats are obsessed with what they do and keep on doing it and have to do it. It's not a... It's not a choice. It's the cliche: it is a calling.

But I've got some ‑ I mean, there was a lot of absolutely amazing artists that have been through the centuries, but I think in each century, I don't think there are huge amounts of great artists. It's like you go through museums around the world and you rush through a room ‑ because I'm always greedily wanting to see as much as I can in every museum ‑ and there'll be one picture in a room that completely stands out, and that picture, you'll go up to it and it will always be by an amazing artist, whereas the others aren't nearly as interesting.

FRAN: You talked about the obsessiveness. I've spoken to some of your family members and your friends, the people who know you so well, who know you best and your work best, and some of them have reported being brought to tears by this exhibition, as I say, even though they know your work so well, and I think that was about the dimension of it and what that says about you and that commitment or obsession, whatever you want to call it.

I wonder: did you learn anything or did anything surprise you about your own work as a result of this exhibition and seeing it displayed as it is?

CRESSIDA: Well, partly a lot to do with Sarina and a lot of other people who've worked very tirelessly on it. It has come together much better than I would have hoped – “bitterlybetterly” or whatever that word is. But...yeah, it's...it has surprised me. It's funny because I'm not one of those people who bursts into tears when they see a picture or listen to music, but recently my sister, Nell, who was in the first version of 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show', did a one‑man ‑ one‑woman show in Brisbane and I went up there ‑ because I was a lot younger ‑ reasonably younger than her, I hadn't seen her perform and I actually started crying at the end of the show. So for the first time ever, I kind of realised what it could be to be moved like that. I'm really thrilled at the way the show sort of flows, which is a lot to do with Sarina's imagination, even though I had my few little stabs of suggestions... (Audience laughs)…and um…

FRAN: We'll come to those!

CRESSIDA: And so it's been a very complicated process. But I'm incredibly touched and flattered that people seem to be getting so much out of it. It’s…I mean, I was saying to an interviewer yesterday who said ‑ I said, "I don't want my work to be pretty" and he laughed. He was a very charming man actually but he laughed and said, "Oh, don't be ridiculous" and I said, "No, that's not - I'm not being...” There's a big difference between being pretty and beautiful. And “pretty” is saccharine and “beautiful” is an Islamic tile or a Vermeer or a well‑balanced design or ‑ it's a very different thing. So when I try and do a picture, to get it as interesting as possible, I try and get it so that the eye is continually stimulated, and sometimes it's a very subtle picture and sometimes it's bold but it's not about - beauty to me, it can be delicacy or it can be very dramatic but it's certainly not about a prettiness.

FRAN: Sarina, what makes Cressida's work unique, from your perspective as a curator? It's obviously more than just the volume of it, more than the complexity of the process, of the woodcut process. Working so closely with this body of work, how would you describe her talent and her - the specialness?

SARINA: Well, I think I tend to fall back on the word “astonishing”. I think Cressida is astonishing as a person, as I've gotten to know you. But her work is astonishing. I think as a curator, you kind of ‑ I was approaching it as a Curator of Prints and Drawings. I didn't ‑ I knew her work to a degree and I really liked her work but I approached it as printing. I didn't understand that she's right in between painting and printmaking. I didn’t - I've never come across an artist who works in this way and, as you mentioned, this extraordinary technique that she developed back in 1979. There's this sort of like layer upon layer of complexity in it, learning…like, the way that Cressida, I think, sees the world through all these sorts of different lenses, all these analytical ways of looking for things through design, through form, through pattern, through colour, her superpowers as a colourist. Like, the more I kind of looked at the work and spoke with her and looked at the ideas, the more astonishing it became.

FRAN: And what was it like working with a living contemporary visual artist and how does it differ from the other curatorial projects you've worked on?

SARINA: Well, yes, I'd just finished working on another project, which is a touring show for Know My Name called 'Spowers and Syme', which is about two Modernist printmakers from the 1930s in Naarm, in Melbourne. And this was just such a huge contrast because that one, I just had to research, look through lots of old newspaper articles and I had to kind of keep putting my curatorial hat on and trying to feel my way across the many, many gaps, the many, many missing pieces in the jigsaw. And, of course, with Cressida, I could go up and visit her or I could talk to her on the phone. I could - there were no gaps. I could just kind of get all that fresh voice, fresh ideas. I knew also that ‑ putting the show together, that I needed to make her happy. So, like, for 'Spowers and Syme', I imagined they're ghosts and I was like I wanted to do the best for them, and you can only ever hope that you achieve that. But with Cressida, because it was back and forth all the time, when I'd suggest something to her, my aim is to kind of ‑ is that I needed you to be happy with it. And sometimes we would disagree on it or there would be more suggestions and back and forth. And it's very satisfying to know that you're getting closer and closer to something that makes the artist truly happy.

FRAN: And how did that process go for you, Cressida? I mean, your involvement in it ‑ we'll talk about the use of colour and stuff in a moment ‑ but your involvement with the layout and the organisation. It's not chronological. It's thematic. That's a little unusual. I mean, how was ‑ was that OK with you, all those decisions? Did she always make you happy? (Audience laughs)

CRESSIDA: Well, I was always ‑ I'm a bit terrified of the idea of the word “curator”...

FRAN: Because?

CRESSIDA: Well, I'd had two sort of retrospective shows at the S.H. Ervin in Sydney in 2008 and about 2014, I think. And for various reasons, the curators had health problems and – you know, it was a difficult ‑ I virtually curated it. And so ‑ and I'm, like most people and artists, a bit of a control freak. And so I was nervous of what Sarina might have up her sleeve. But the more we got on, I respected her. She's very intelligent and sensitive. And so the more we got on, the more it developed. And she had ideas that I wouldn't have necessarily put in, like the written pieces, and I had a few ideas of pictures that she hadn't been necessarily familiar with or thought would look good. But it really was a very harmonic or…

FRAN: Harmonious.

CRESSIDA: …harmonious relationship in the end. And my darling husband ‑ clever husband ‑ Warren, who is a photographer and master printer, he did a lot of the work ‑ helped photograph a lot of the images again because a lot of the past works had been photographed before digital, in slide form, and he could make them look a lot better.

But Sarina and I… she's got a great eye and she pulled me ‑ when I got a bit sort of, I don't know, perhaps egocentric or, you know, wanting something particularly that would stand out, she pulled me back a few times and said, "No, I think this is more interesting", which is good because it's a bit like a director in a film or...

FRAN: And there are some wonderful touches in the exhibition, if you've seen it or you're lucky enough to see it, that I really love, I've never seen before, like the collection of all your brushes or your empty paint tubes or the colour swatches. I just love seeing that evidence of the artist's life. I love that. But also you did get a fair bit of say in it in terms of ‑ I understand you came up with the wall colours for the Gallery with each space?

CRESSIDA: Well, yeah, I must say I ‑ it's funny. There was a Melbourne art fair that I exhibited in I think it was 2017 or something with Sophie Gannon, one of my dealers, and as I - I paint on paper ‑ I mean, sorry, I paint - my palette is litho paper and I started really liking looking at the palettes because they're the exact opposite of the pictures. The pictures are very tightly composed, whereas the palettes look like there's a freedom to them. And so I just thought ‑ I thought it would make good wrapping paper. I don't know if it has - I know that my card man, who makes the cards, he has printed a bit of it but I don't know if it's sold well. But I thought that would look good in the show in a cabinet. And also in the Melbourne show, I started collecting ‑I like the look of all the little paint tubes because when – I mean, my work is a mixture of printing and painting and drawing ‑‑

FRAN: Perhaps we should just, without going into great detail ‑ for people who haven't seen it and don't know that, we all know it's woodblocks but it's a drawing and then a carving and then a painting and then a printing and then a repainting, so you're all those elements.

CRESSIDA: Well, that's why I started thinking, well, maybe I should show people a few paint tubes because otherwise when people associate printing, they don't actually think of painting. And so I started collecting the paint tubes and the sable brushes. I mean, a lot of printing, as most people might know, is done with rollers and inks and stuff, whereas I paint with watercolour paint, with tiny sable brushes.

SARINA: And just on the one block as well, which is unusual.

CRESSIDA: Yeah. And so I started collecting them and I really liked the look of them, so that's why we put them in that cabinet, and I also put - I listen - I'm chained to the radio, like a lot of artists are because ‑‑

FRAN: Hence our friendship! (Audience laughs)

CRESSIDA: ...because mostly you're solitary and it's a great way of keeping in touch with the world and hearing about people, as a lot of people here would probably know too. So I put one of my radios in the cabinet. I don't know if anyone actually realises that's why. But I've still got - I still use a Sony radio at the moment. But I use them so much, though, they break down. (Audience laughs)

FRAN: Sarina writes in the exhibition catalogue that the exhibition invites questions about how art can bear witness to a life. How has your life impacted your work? Now, that's a big question because, of course, life impacts work but, for instance, I know you painted throughout the death of your first husband, Peter, and exhibited later, after his death. Can we - could we see the loss and sorrow in your work? Did it mark a change in any way, do you think?

CRESSIDA: I definitely think ‑ I mean, as you go through life, you go through different changes and it affects… Just as we all do, it affects different behaviours. And so some of the pictures - when I started off, they were very bold and they had assets that some of the later ones may not have, but the later ones may have intricacies that the earlier ones didn't have.

But someone gave me some flannel flowers when Peter was - he was dying at home and it was a very sad, tragic experience. But someone gave me some flannel flowers and I was drawing them in the studio and I wanted them to look like they were actually, in real life, against the sky because I loved the idea of you know ‑ not that I've been to the Middle East but those Islamic domes with white stars or silver stars on them looking up against the blue, and I thought that reminded me of the flannel flowers. So I drew them first and then he loved the drawing and then I painted them. And so that was an example. And then when he died, I spent a lot of time lying on this sofa drinking probably far too many gin and tonics, looking into the reflection of the window, and there happened to be three Japanese rice‑papered lights that reflected down into the window and I thought that would be a good composition. And I think for some reason the work became a little bit more moody. And then my sister, Nell, used to live in the Northern Hemisphere and go to a lot of museums and she gave me a catalogue of ‑ it was called 'Rooms with a View' and it was from a show at the National Gallery in London and there were all these wonderful 18th century paintings of ‑ a lot of them were in places like Germany, Copenhagen, Denmark ‑ I mean, Sweden. Places I hadn't been to. And so I went on a bit of a ‑ I took her on what you'd call a ‑ I called it a “Kunst tour” because “Kunst”, if you didn't know, is German for “art”. And we started off in Hamburg and went to Berlin and then Munich and then Vienna. And it was incredibly inspiring because I saw all these artists' work that I'd never seen. And so I then started sort of going into a few ‑ getting influenced by a few interiors. There's an amazing artist called Kersting, who does rather mysterious little interiors. He did a great portrait of Caspar David Friedrich painting in his studio. So my work went into a more slightly moody feel but I think it's going to get back...I'm going - I want to do a series of lichen ‑‑

FRAN: Let me stop you there because I want to get to the interiors because there's some wonderful interiors in the exhibition but I notice that Ngaire has asked: "When you see so much beauty everywhere, how do you choose? How do you stop from getting overwhelmed by all the things you want to paint?". Is that a problem for you?

CRESSIDA: Well, the funny thing is I can see… the great thing is I am a bit of a slave to my eyes, which is...

FRAN: You see beauty in the lichen.

CRESSIDA: Well, lichen is beautiful. I mean, that's a definite thing that's beautiful. I must say once, for whatever reason, I was getting my mother's house painted and it was painted by very these very nice Korean painters. But, to my absolute horror, I went over there and they'd scrubbed all the lichen off her roof and I nearly had a heart attack. (Audience laughs). Anyway, I saw a lot of wonderful lichen in Cambodia years ago and I've done one ‑ there's one picture of lichen in this show, but it's exquisite and apparently it only grows if it's not a very polluted area, which is interesting, but ‑‑

FRAN: But, generally, are you seeing inspiration everywhere?

CRESSIDA: Well, I see - I see - yes. I mean, the thing is you can see it in design. You can see it in ‑ I did a bit of ‑ I had to do a speech on opening night and they asked me to do a PowerPoint presentation, which - I was showing them how you could actually see interesting design in tangles of power points under your desk. (Audience laughs). I mean, practically everything has an interesting design, particularly things that have to work, like knives and boats and ‑ I mean, nature is the most ‑ to me the most beautiful because it's sort of ‑ you can't ‑ it's so magical, the formation of it. But having said that, interiors - often you can make an interior that looks pretty dreary look a lot better ‑‑

FRAN: Look a lot better. You could make a fishbone look good, Cressida.

CRESSIDA: Well, they have a very good design! (Audience laughs).

FRAN: Exactly! See. And, Sarina, I know you've commented about that ‑ Cressida's capacity to make a compost bin or a fish bone or the remnants of a meal look beautiful. But back to the interiors, as part of the celebrations for the 40th anniversary of the Gallery, the National Gallery, the Gallery purchased 'Bedroom nocturne'. Can you tell us about why ‑ here it is ‑ why you chose this work?

SARINA: Yes. Well, Cressida has been working in the round format, so the tondo format, since about 2018. And that's sort of another sort of experimental layer to her practice. And in the visits that I had, she was kind of sending me little snaps back and forth of the works that she was working on. This one was done this year towards a solo show Cressida had in July at Philip Bacon Galleries in Meanjin, in Brisbane. And I - out of all of them ‑ I mean, they were all amazing and I loved them all ‑ but this one really captured something to me. And I think we had a conversation about ‑ you were saying it was one of the most intimate works that you've made because obviously it's your bedroom, which is a fairly private space for all of us. And for me, with my little curatorial hat on at the back of my head, I was thinking about how ‑ you know, like, the bed, the unmade bed, is something that has been visited through art history for centuries ‑ you know, Delacroix for example through to Tracey Emin, in all sorts of different ways and for all sorts of different reasons, so it had that really beautiful lineage. And I loved that in this very special space, you had a lot of works by other artists that you've collected that are obviously really important to you because you keep them in the space. And what surprised me is there was a lot of First Nations artists that you'd collected, so the bark ‑ the Wandjina bark by Lily Karadada, the wonderful yam dreaming work by Djirrirra Wununmurra, a little bit of the Queenie McKenzie print that you can see there. There's a Japanese ‑ some of the ukiyo‑e prints that you've collected.

CRESSIDA: There's a Utamaro. There's a little Bonnard drypoint from a book. It's of his wife, Marthe, looking out a window. And there's a little corner of another Indigenous work poking in. It's funny because when my sister and mother ‑ years ago, my sister Nell and my mother had a terrible car accident on the way to Uluru, which was then called Ayers Rock, and my other sister and I went up and got them, collected them, and they were very badly injured. And I bought that little picture in the art ‑ the one art gallery there then. And it's funny how these things still keep a good ‑ you know, appear in other pictures.

FRAN: That's interesting, isn't it, because ‑ I mean, speaking of art bearing witness to your life, 'Bedroom nocturne', it invites us into your house, into your bedroom. I would say you're a fairly private person but here we are in your bedroom. How do you – how do you decide what to let us see and how careful are you about that?

CRESSIDA: Well, actually… I mean, when I saw the crumpled sheets and there's some more Sally Campbell textiles…I'm sounding like…

FRAN: That's another sister.

CRESSIDA: ..Sally's PR agent. (Audience laughs). I just loved the look of all the crumples. And I've never ‑ I've actually hardly ever painted drapery, which, when you start painting it, you realise why in the Renaissance era they forced the apprentices to learn how to paint drapery because it's actually very difficult, because it's like a person. You've got to have flesh on its bones. My mother always used to say painting people with hats is difficult because you've got to make the hat look like it's sitting on the head, just like if you've got a ship in the ocean, you don't want the ship to just look like it's, you know, solid on the ocean.

Anyway, I loved the...I just liked all the colours and the mood. Even though Warren does share the bed, I quite like that you wouldn't know whether it was just one person's bed or not. And also you think: who's left the bed? Is someone just about to get into it? I've always been not the most tidy bed‑keeper but I just like the whole mood of it and I also quite liked…I've always been someone who moves slowly with the technical times, unlike Warren, who is sort of a Mr Fast Man with the digital world. But if you peer into it, there's a landline telephone that I still use and then there's the iPhone and then there's an alarm clock and a glass of water and it's just got - and an electric cord, which always is often a good device in a composition. It's an intimate picture but it's...and I like the different pictures. I like the - that industrial picture is interesting with the black and white of the Indigenous. And I love the Queenie McKenzie. So it just worked as a composition really.

FRAN: I think at this point we should actually pay tribute to Warren, your husband, Warren Macris, because if you don't know, he is a technical whizz. In fact, he created the amazing wallpaper at the entrance to the exhibition, which is just a phenomenal work of art in itself, isn't it really?

CRESSIDA: Yeah.

FRAN: Sarina, the exhibition has been commissioned as part of the Gallery's Know My Name gender equity initiative. Obviously, Cressida is a leading Australian female artist. Would you describe her work as female in its subject or indeed feminist in its subject?

SARINA: Hmm….I think perhaps traditionally, women have focused more on domestic settings than men in art history for various reasons over time. I guess something that I learnt from putting this together with Cressida is that I had only known mainly the sort of still life and interior works, whereas there are a lot of images that are around the working harbour. There are a lot of industrial images that you've still managed to make incredibly alluring and reveal themselves to me in a different sort of a way. So, for me, I think the fact that Cressida actually works across so many genres that I hadn't realised ‑ across still life, self‑portraiture, the interiors, landscape ‑ that was a real revelation as well and that's something I've really enjoyed when I've talked with audiences and with people who are guiding in the exhibition as well, that she's...that this work is about her life but your life isn't only in your home or in your garden.

FRAN: That’s it.

SARINA: It's out around the harbour. It's out on walks that you used to do with your mum or with your family. So it extends.

FRAN: So, Cressida, do you describe yourself ‑ would you describe yourself as ‑ your work as feminist art? Is that ever a description you've used?

CRESSIDA: Um...No, I've never really thought of ‑ I was brought up in a family ‑ very lucky to be brought up in a family that didn't lay any ‑ both my brilliant father and brilliant mother didn't sort of lay any expectations on any of us. If we were interested in something, they'd encourage it. But if we weren't – um, you know...I mean, I was so hopeless at music, I was given a ruler to play instead of a recorder. (Audience laughs). Mum didn't do that but…

FRAN: You got the message!

CRESSIDA: ..the rather unpleasant music teacher did. So even - and also both my parents were very ‑ my mother had gone to art school, taught by Dobell. Dobell wanted to do a portrait of her. She was a raving beauty but, as well as that, she was quite a tearaway and she went off and cut all her hair off like Greta Garbo and then he didn't want to ‑ he was the conservative. He didn't want to paint her then. And my father was not a chauvinist at all. So my brother was brought up with three pretty lively ‑ well, four with mum ‑ very lively girls and he was very unconventional. He was a brilliant scientist. He tragically died recently. But he was one of the people that ‑ if it wasn't for his PhD, we wouldn't have 60% of the solar panels in the world. So he was pretty amazing. But...um… So when it comes to feminism, I just did what I wanted to do. I didn't have to be one of those people who had to push against their upbringing. The only thing that I would say is that when I was a young artist ‑ I mean, I'm now 62; I went to art school when I was 16 ‑ there were a lot of chauvinistic art teachers, and most of them were men, male painters, and they mostly wanted to paint in the style or sculpt in the ‑ they wanted you to do what they did, which… That was irritating. So I don't know whether that makes me a feminist but I just went and did what I wanted to do quietly and I definitely think now the world is ‑ I mean, it's so much more open for women artists of all types - even though I was lucky, in that people appreciated my work, and I started off getting very modest prizes but, gradually, after seven years on the dole, I could manage to support myself. And so it's a strange… And some of my work's subjects were interiors and some of them were totally different subjects. I mean, you could look at the famous Italian painter called Morandi, who most of his fame comes from his minimalist still lifeslives, but he was a man.

FRAN: Yes.

CRESSIDA: And he also did some wonderful, as probably most of you know, landscapes. But...I mean, Matisse did so many incredible still lives and he was a man. It's more - I think it's more the pressure – it comes from the pressure that's put on the person by their parents or the school they go to or whether they feel they have to grow up as being a feminist or ‑‑

FRAN: So you raised a few things then about, yes, you paint interiors but so did Matisse do still liveslifes, et cetera. Sarina, when choosing Cressida for this blockbuster exhibition - I mean, obviously she's a highly collected artist but not necessarily highly collected by our institutions, by some of our major art institutions. For instance, the NGV I think doesn't hold a Cressida. What does that say about Cressida's work, do you think, and our art establishment, if anything?

SARINA: Well, I think - I think she has been well collected by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and their remit is really – you know, the different states do tend to focus on the artists…

FRAN: Of the state.

SARINA: …of their state. So we did borrow a lot of really amazing key works from them and there are a number of regional institutions that we've borrowed up and down the east coast predominantly and it's kind of like piecing it all together, in that you were mainly exhibiting in Sydney, then exhibiting in Brisbane, a little bit in Melbourne. I think part of the trickiness perhaps is your unique position between painting and printmaking…

CRESSIDA: I think you're right.

SARINA: …because inside institutions, you have different curators who look after different areas.

FRAN: So you do print and paper.

SARINA: So I do works on paper. So we had some really beautiful works on paper, but perhaps someone might have come to us and said, "Oh, but it's a painting" so, therefore, it would go to a different curator and they'd be like, "Oh, no, it's a print", so it comes back and forth, and no‑one's really ‑‑

CRESSIDA: No‑one has like to pigeon ‑ I haven't been easy to pigeonhole. And I was really thrilled when Sarina encouraged for the Gallery to purchase the woodblock of the 'Nocturne' because it's definitely a combination of painting and printing - my work. The painting part ‑ the woodblock - the texture that comes off when the print comes off is like a fresco, and with the prints, it's more like a watery colour, delicate, more like a Japanese print, even though it's not made with multi blocks. But I also have to say, as everyone knows, there are fashions in art. And when I was younger, working, there were...there were fashions that were being collected by galleries and I wasn't in that fashion. As well as that, the artist Margaret Olley, who was at that stage quite a bit older than I was, she was actually buying young artists' work and donating them to regional galleries and ‑‑

FRAN: I just want to ask you a bit more about that because we really do need to get to questions in a moment, but just on that notion of the fashion, how do you feel about being so in demand by private collectors, which you are, but, up until perhaps more recently, not so much by some galleries? Obviously, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, thanks to Margaret Olley and others, because it means a lot of your works aren't seen by most of us. Does that pain you?

CRESSIDA: Well…yeah, it is unfortunate but it's the same with a lot of artists. I mean, even if you ‑ if you go around the world and you want to see some of the best artists, you've often got to just go ‑ you can see one in a whole city. So it's...and also, sadly, different galleries have had opportunities to buy wonderful works at different times and, because of fashions, they haven't done it. I mean, I think it was the early 1900s the Art Gallery of New South Wales had the opportunity to buy a whole lot of Impressionists' work at very reasonable prices and instead they bought rather dull Victorian Australian pieces. So it's a complicated thing and I've always thought that the only thing that sorts out good and bad work is time, and even that might be a strange thing because…I mean, maybe even in 200 years, a great artist like Chardin, his work might have gone out of fashion. I mean, it is really tricky in that way.

FRAN: I'm going to move to questions now, but just before I do, I think it's a perfect time to quote the art critic John McDonald, who wrote in the SMH ‑ the ‘Sydney Morning Herald’ recently: "If ever there was an exhibition to silence the doubters and vanquish the critics, this is it" and more than that: "If ever there was a chance to show everybody a range of your work throughout your career, this is it." So thank God for the National Gallery of Australia and for this exhibition, I think.

So there's been some fantastic questions coming in. And just on the notion of the New South Wales Gallery collecting a lot of Cressida's, for instance, because you're from Sydney, somebody asked: "Do you consider yourself a Sydney artist? Does location define your perspective?".

CRESSIDA: Well, when I was in the period when I was ‑ I grew up in Greenwich and it was near the Shell terminal, and I do like industrial shapes because they can be very decorative and…also my father had died when I was 21 and Mum was only 59 and we used to go ‑ she would come as my drawing companion because if you're drawing on your own outside, often you get a bit spooked by ‑‑

FRAN: Strangers.

CRESSIDA: Yeah. You don't want Ivan Milat coming up behind you…

SARINA: No, you don’t.

CRESSIDA: ..and hitting you on the head or something! (Audience laughs). So even though Mum wasn't exactly a bodyguard, she'd be sitting reading the paper with some chicken sandwiches next to me. But I drew a lot of subjects around Gore Bay. So that is a very Sydney area, but as far as...and the bush parts - I'd love to do more bush pictures but I tend to only like doing them if I can be private doing them. So I was living with Peter, my first husband, in an old Walter Burley Griffin house, subletting it from a friend in Avalon, and luckily the bush was all around us, and so it was fantastic because I just had the bush there as like…

FRAN: As aA backdrop.

CRESSIDA: ..an interior.

FRAN: I'm going to move ‑ we're going to run out of time very quickly so let's see if we can move through a couple. Sarina, Barbara asks: "How long did it take to bring the exhibition together?". So a survey of an artist's life like this, when a lot is in private collections, was that particularly challenging and how long did it take you?

SARINA: Yeah, it was tricky. I think I was asked to start working on this project early last year but, as we know, pandemic and we weren't able to travel, so we couldn't go out to find all the works in people's homes, so hence there was a lot of reliance on the conversations with Cressida, and Warren, of course, was really helpful with that too, providing lots of prints of images and the beautiful book that Cressida had made with Peter back in 2008 and looking through archives, and then working with Cressida's different dealers to kind of track down works, and that became trickier and trickier. A bit of a detective story over time, I think.

CRESSIDA: Yeah.

SARINA: I had a wonderful friend, Brett Stone, who used to work with Rex Irwin, looking through the Rex Irwin archives before the library shut down up in Sydney and trying to see what was pencilled on the back of system cards. We had the wonderful Lachlan Henderson at Philip Bacon Galleries facilitating and tracking them all down. So it took a long time.

CRESSIDA: It's real detective work, isn't it?

SARINA: Yeah. We couldn't find everything that we were looking ‑ I mean, we had so much to choose from, but ‑‑

FRAN: Just briefly on that, Cressida, do you feel like ‑ I mean, you couldn't find everything but do you feel like this retrospective, this survey of your work, reflects the entirety of your work or is there one piece missing that you would love to have had?

CRESSIDA: It's pretty good. I mean...

FRAN: It's great! (Audience laughs).

CRESSIDA: It's pretty good. There was one picture that we wanted, because I had a few ‑ I had about three exhibitions with Angela Nevill, who's a very interesting dealer in London, and she sold some ‑ the shows went very well there and then for various reasons ‑ she did them with Philip Bacon and, for various reasons, we stopped. But there was a white Angophora picture that I did when I was staying up at Avalon and we really wanted that, and in the end, it was finally tracked down but the woman just didn't want to lend it. She didn't see any point. I don't ‑‑

FRAN: She couldn't bear to live without it, Cressida. Let's face it.

CRESSIDA: It's a long ‑ I mean, it's a big deal when you're sending pictures overseas, that sort of thing.

FRAN: For sure. Cressida, this is the first question that came in tonight. From Jen. It's been sitting here for a while on the screen but I love it. "How do you feel when you're in creative mode?".

CRESSIDA: Um...I actually feel quite relaxed. I think ‑ I know it's a rather over‑used term but I think it really is my meditation. Um...I mean, I'm so ‑ if it's going well - it doesn't mean it's easy, but if it's going well, it's...it's very sort of…it's a puzzle. It's like ‑ I've always thought it's like being ‑ my brother once said to me when I said, "Oh, God, I'm probably going to get some kind of terrible disease of dementia soon because I'm doing the same thing all the time", and he said, "No, you're not because every day you're actually trying to discover something else in the work", and it is like discovering a puzzle or finding the right colours. It's continually interesting. Sometimes ‑ the most difficult part is actually the printing because different paints are absorbed by the water at different times and so suddenly part of the picture will all start blurring and the other part will stick. So that is actually not meditative at all! (Audience laughs). But…but it certainly ‑ in 25 ‑ in however many years I've been doing this, it's never become easy. And that's a good thing because if it had ‑‑

FRAN: Just on that, the technical question Craig has asked: "The colour tones of the blocks seem more muted than the vibrant tones of the prints. Which best represents your vision?".

CRESSIDA: Yeah, that's interesting. I don't know why but the ‑ with the prints, if I paint ‑ after I've printed it ‑ first of all, I paint the watercolour paint on the blocks very thickly, so it's not like fine watercolour painting that you'll see in an old…well, or any watercolour. It's thick. It's in layers. So when it's actually printed, it's almost sunk into the paper, which is ‑ another good thing is that unless someone puts it right opposite a brilliantly light window, it very rarely fades. But if I paint ‑ after I've done the print, if I then paint with the same colour onto the paper, it doesn't have the luminacy of the printed watercolour, which I've never known why. But, as far as the blocks go, I know what you mean by them not being quite as bright but I love ‑ to me it's a bit like an old Persian rug. I do like that frescoey feel and sometimes they've got a density that the prints don't have. So it's a half – you know, some of them to me work better than others and some of them, you know...it's a personal taste.

FRAN: And it's a lovely thing in the exhibition, speaking to the curator now, to have the example of the block next to the painting. It's a good thing to be able to experience that.

SARINA: Yeah, it was nice to ‑ I thought of them as little reunions because I know…

CRESSIDA: Yeah.

SARINA: I don't know if they're ever really ever sold to the same owners.

CRESSIDA: No. No, they aren't, which is interesting. It's...yeah. I think that people do definitely either prefer the print or the block.

FRAN: Perhaps we'll do a survey after. We are out of time now so I would just like to say honestly what a fabulous honour it has been to interview you, Cressida, and you, Sarina. Thank you. This exhibition, if you haven't seen it yet, for our onsite audience, you can get a chance to see it now. The Gallery will be open until 7.30 tonight. I do encourage you to stay and take a close look because it's beautiful. Cressida's work is so beautiful. The Gallery Shop is open too, if you'd like to purchase a copy of the exhibition publication, which Cressida and Warren, I know - and, of course, Sarina - but worked so intensely on. It is a work of art in itself, as are the coffee mugs, if I do say so. I purchased them myself! (Audience laughs). But for our audience online, thank you very much for joining us. It's been wonderful to have your company. The exhibition is on until?

SARINA: The 19th of February.

FRAN: So if you do get a chance to come down to Sydney and see it, really it's absolutely worth ‑ oh, to Canberra! Where I am? (Audience laughs). It is absolutely worth it. This is the National Gallery of Australia. It's a wonderful thing. Could you please thank Sarina Noordhuis‑Fairfax and Cressida Campbell.

CRESSIDA: And you! (Applause)