When one of Australia’s most successful artists was left partially paralysed by a near-lethal stroke at just 47, many people assumed his career would be over. It would now be impossible for him to paint the large-scale colourist and abstract canvasses for which he’d become so well-known as a 12-time Archibald Prize finalist and with multiple placings in the Wynne and Sulman prizes. But they reckoned without the man himself.
Instead, Robert Eadie simply began work on much smaller paintings, with a pad of paper balanced on one knee and pastels held in a now claw-like right hand, at first in black-and-white tones and then later back into a full blaze of colour. “I never wanted to stop working”: Robert Eadie in his Darlinghurst home. Credit: Nikki Short And he worked steadily, intensely; some would even say obsessively.
“I just never wanted to stop working,” Eadie says now, 35 years on from that fateful day when life stood still. “I went from a fit, robust, outgoing bloke to a man who had to find a meaningful internal life to compensate for the loss. I couldn’t go out any more, and I withdrew from the commercial art world, so I had to create a different world for myself.
Loading “I couldn’t work at that large scale any more. So, where previously, I would do small sketches and then embark on the large work; instead, those smaller works became the finished work. But this internalisation gave me the ability to make small work much more meaningful and make sense o.