18 beauty Art artworks ideas

Of Delicious Recoil — Cressida Campbell Cressida Campbell is an Australian artist born in 1960. From the very beginning of her career, Campbell knew she would never fit into the fashionable circles of the artistic avant-garde. After finishing high school she attended Sydney College of the Arts for only three days before realizing that the abiding emphasis on conceptual art was far removed from her own artistic vision, and would take her nowhere fast. She went on to study at the National Art School more modestly known as East Sydney Tech in those days. It was there she developed her unique woodblock print-making technique. Campbell developed an interest in woodblock printing when she studied in 1980 at the Yoshida Hanga Academy in Tokyo. Working from a home studio in Sydney’s Bronte, Cressida depicts scenes from a familiar world – domestic interiors, unmistakeably ‘Australian’ landscapes, and the most exquisite still lifes. Her intensely laborious process combines both painting and printing, in an innovative technique which results in two unique artworks – a single painted and engraved woodblock, and a one-off woodblock print on paper. As Cressida outlines below, each piece starts with a detailed line drawing on board, after which the linework is engraved to create a single-use woodblock. She then carefully paints thick layers of watercolour into the scene, ‘colouring in’ her carved line drawing. When this process is complete, the entire board is delicately dampened with water, and used to create a single print on paper. Given this painstaking process, it’s no wonder that each work can take anywhere between two weeks to four months to complete.