Here is Cressida Campbell, one of "Australia’s most significant contemporary artists", at home with Japanese Hydrangeas 2005 (private collection), surrounded by a collection of carefully chosen objects which appear in her paintings. Thanks to readers in Australia who have kindly emailed, we can now add that there is a catalogue for the Cressida Campbell exhibition in Canberra (it closes this weekend), and a video in which she discusses her work (scroll down to the end of the page).

Cressida Campbell's cool, precise, beautifully detailed, delicately coloured work often reflects a Japanese influence, as with Persimmon and silk (1997, private collection). This painting is on the cover of the best book about her work The Woodblock Painting of Cressida Campbell (2009) ed. Peter Crayford, but it is now unfortunately difficult to find. 

Over the years, Cressida Campbell has refined the traditional woodblock printing techniques she learned in Japan in the early 1980s to create her own unique process. In the same way that she pays great attention to the selection of the tools for her art, she also observes her domestic implements in forensic detail. Kitchen utensils 1993 (Art Gallery of New South Wales) turns the subjects into a collection of miniature pieces of intelligent design, with a marvellous mix of shapes, textures, and edges.  

The National Gallery of Australia says of Cressida Campbell's exquisitely detailed work that it combines "keen observation with a delicacy of line...and captures the overlooked beauty of the everyday". Her complex process involves drawing on a plywood block, carving or etching it, then hand-painting with watercolour before printing either in small editions or as a unique impression. Awareness of this painstaking method makes her images, such as Nasturtiums 2002 (Art Gallery of New South Wales), all the more remarkable.

A Christmas card from a friend in Australia featuring Bedroom nocturne 2022 (National Gallery of Australia) prompted us to find out more about the artist Cressida Campbell whose work is on the Post this week. Her intricate woodblock paintings, "located uniquely between painting and printmaking", document her life with "spontaneous still-life arrangements of food and flowers and introspective views within the rooms of her Sydney home".

In 2010, Wallace Sewell won an open competition to design a new moquette, the now iconic 'Barman'. Again, it incorporates the London Underground roundel, and includes four London landmarks: St Paul's Cathedral, the London Eye, Big Ben and Tower Bridge (this short video explains the design). It is used on the Northern, Central, and Jubilee lines and, in a slightly different colourway, on the Bakerloo line.

The highly talented and prolific Marianne Straub designed 'Straub' (c1966), one of the best known of all moquettes, and widely used on the Underground and buses. Andrew Martin, author of Seats of London (2019), a brilliant 'field-guide' to London Transport moquette patterns, calls it 'subtle and sophisticated'. Here is Queen Elizabeth II blending in with the design on the Piccadilly Line in December 1977. (From 2nd April to 2nd July there will be an exhibition devoted to Marianne Straub at The Fry Gallery in Saffron Walden.)