Strange Light

Robert Eadie
14 August - 1 September 2024

Drawing and painting daily and intuitively, Robert Eadie (b. 1941) has created an extensive and compelling body of work over a 60-year career. Strange Light, presented at the Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf, is the first major exhibition of Eadie’s work in over a decade.

From the 1960s to the late 1980s, Eadie was a fixture in Sydney’s art scene, gaining critical and commercial recognition for his large-scale colourist and abstract paintings. In 1989, his world and work underwent a dramatic transformation when a near-fatal stroke left him partially paralysed, leading to a new, private, and prolific style of artmaking.

Strange Light showcases key moments and motifs from Eadie's evolving oeuvre, highlighting narratives of resilience, reinvention, and a profound sensitivity to the natural world. 

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Strange Light

by Miriam McGarry

Drawing has been a reliable constant in Robert Eadie’s life. Growing up, the underside of his parents’ dining room table was transformed into a ‘child’s Sistine Chapel’, scrawled with towns and people. Through art school he developed his own style, and under the mentorship of dear friend and studio partner Rod Shaw, he learned to make sense of his work and find joy in his own practice. It was – and remains – a practice that finds space in the cracks around life’s demands. Working in little grabs, twenty minutes here and there, building hours in the studio across pockets of the day.

He emerged as part of the Sydney art scene, dabbling with fame and winning prizes as a colourist producing large-scale works, illuminated in the glow of a pack of bright young things. Robert used his art to share causes he believed in, creating murals and posters alongside the anti-apartheid and anti-Vietnam movements. Working with the anti-development group, Green Bans, he painted an iconic large-scale mural of the Andrew (Boy) Charlton Pool on a railway pylon in Woolloomooloo. Then in 1989 Robert had a stroke. Everything turned upside down and a bewildering new world emerged. But while his life had changed, one thing remained. Robert reflects, ‘I had art, and I had family.’

Away from the art world, and temporarily confined to a wheelchair on the ground floor of his home, Robert’s world became smaller and more internally focused. ‘It had to’, he explains, ‘in order to survive.’ Note making and sketching in journals enabled a space for capturing thoughts, and to find vitality and fulfilment in his own inner world. His established way of working in snatches of time served him well as he regained strength, using moments to make marks with pastels on paper. Overtime he re-learnt to paint, paring the colour back to remove a complexity that challenged his brain after the stroke, but introducing a different kind of freedom to explore and ‘follow my nose.’

While the canvas size had to be adapted to suit Robert’s changed physicality, his ambition for resolved and potent work did not diminish. Robert retained his sense of creative attention and ability to capture a sense of form, light and depth in the land and seascapes around him. His works show the power of a breaking wave, a gash of blue sky breaking through the clouds, a dance of light through ghostly trees. Weighty depths and solid forms are balanced with fleeting light or movement offering both stability, and moments of freedom and expansiveness. Robert explains that he ‘learnt to make something of substance out of what had previously been a sketch. And [he] also learnt that smaller works could be joined together to make something larger.’

Here he is referring to the collection of works installed as a gridded series to create one cohesive seascape of bobbing cardinal marks in Harbour Marks (1993-2003). But the comment also captures his practice and life more broadly. Putting on Bach or old country music in the studio, making a cup of tea, watching the ocean, a note or sketch in a journal, taking a walk, drawing, drawing, drawing. Making a meaningful life and artistic practice out of the smaller pieces joined together.

And now Strange Light shares some of those small pieces, joined together to capture the harbour's shifting moods, the last rays of light across the water, a detritus of shopping trolleys and the rhythm of living. This exhibition illuminates Robert’s lifelong commitment to art making as a way of being in the world. As friend Kevin Connor described, when discussing his Archibald Prize finalist portrait of Robert, ‘He’s somebody I’ve always admired. What you’d call an artist’s artist. He’s also an extremely quiet man who doesn’t seek the limelight, a gentle character.’

Strange Light depicts a body work made outside of the limelight, created with humble integrity and artistic excellence. The exhibition also reflects what became most important to Robert after the stroke: ‘family, working, and going for walks.’

Miriam McGarry
August 2024