National Gallery of Australia's popular Cressida Campbell exhibition closes soon

"Well, a better word is probably 'drunk'," she said. Droll as ever.

And then she adds archly: "To my amazement, the posts got a few 'likes'. And I thought, 'Jesus, if that's what people are liking, they must be desperate'."

Social media is, nevertheless, showing Campbell a lot of love at the moment as visitors to her eponymous exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia post their appreciation, for her and her work.

Even more so, now, as the exhibition is entering its final days, finishing in Canberra on Sunday, February 19.

In the wake of the exhibition, which opened in spring, Campbell, who says she's "hopeless on the internet", lies in bed at night while her husband Warren Macris scrolls through countless posts with the hashtag #cressidacampbell, from people who've been to see her work.

"He reads out comments people have made and, I must say, they've been incredible," she said.

"I have to stop him from reading out too many because I said I'd have to enlarge the hallway."

To get your head through?

"Yeah," she said, with that marvellous chuckle.

It's a measure of Campbell's down-to-earth nature that she's making jokes about the success of the exhibition, obviously delighting in it but never boasting about it.

In all seriousness, though, she says the reaction of people who've made the effort to see the exhibition do mean a lot.

"They say really smart things. I respect what they say. And I'm just very touched and flattered," she said.

Campbell, 62, says National Gallery director Dr Nick Mitzevich took a leap of faith by staging the exhibition of her work over spring and summer, in the gallery's traditional blockbuster spot, putting a living Australian female artist in the spotlight rather than a long-gone overseas master.

And the fact visitors to the exhibition have reacted with such joy and positivity to it has made Campbell very happy.

"It just feels wonderful. I feel honored, put it that way, and I couldn't have asked for more," she said.

"People have been so great about it."

The gallery won't release visitor numbers until the exhibition has finished, but Dr Mitzevich suggests the attendances should be good.

''We're honoured to work with Cressida Campbell to present this exhibition at the National Gallery, which has resulted in our busiest summer in three years," he said.

"A lot of our visitors have commented on the extraordinary beauty that Cressida captures from the simplest things around her home and garden, and her extraordinary technical prowess.

"Cressida Campbell is one of the most important artists living and working today and everyone leaves the exhibition ready to share their experience with friends, family and colleagues."

Featuring more than 140 of Campbell's woodcut prints and woodblock paintings, the exhibition covers her art from childhood to the present, her keen eye always elevating the ordinary to something extraordinary and beautiful.

"What's been really incredible to me about this show is how it's connected with people," she said.

"It's something about my work that moves people. All kinds of people. I think that's been the most moving thing for me."

Campbell, too, recognises her own exhibition as something rare. Many of the works were borrowed from private collections and have not been on display for decades. Her husband Warren has been busy photographing them because Campbell is as excited as anyone else to see them.

"Pictures I won't see again, unless they come up for auction," she said.

And she and Warren also had a film made of the exhibition, for their own record.

"As you can imagine, it's not every day of the week this will happen," she said, dry as ever.

But while she's enjoyed visiting Canberra and now has some favourite restaurants (Italian and Sons, Rebel Rebel and Iori) and the National Arboretum is next on her to-do list, Campbell says she hasn't spent too much time at the exhibition.

When your life's work is presented to you, sometimes it can be too much for such a meticulous artist.

"I actually haven't been in there much on my own. The odd person suggests I should go in and have a quiet look. But for me there's an element of horror going in there. It's wonderful on the one hand, but you see all the faults," she said.

"Because it's over many years, you see the good and the bad. Meaning there's aspects to earlier work that has good aspects and different aspects and later work that has good aspects, just like us, as we're growing older, you don't blunder in quite as much as when you're older but at the same time you're not quite as lively as you might have been."

And she has been wilfully mischievous when it comes to some gallery commitments. When she was asked to present a PowerPoint presentation, Campbell had no idea what staff were talking about.

"So I put a giant photograph of a power point [up] and then said, 'Most people wouldn't be aware of how important power points are in composition'," she said, that laugh in her voice.

"And then I put all these interiors up and with a stick pointed to all the power points..... So people got a few laughs out of that."

It's that lack of pretence that makes her works sing. In the exhibition, she talks about painting an iron with its cord hanging down, simply because she liked the way it looked - but then everyone started to apply much deeper meaning to it.

The exhibition has been a success in other ways. Its illustrated catalogue, created in collaboration with the artist, has been shortlisted for the 2023 Indie Book Awards, with the winners to be announced in March.

Cressida Campbell was also a Know My Name project, an initiative by the National Gallery to deliberately increase the representation of female artists.

And there's no doubt many more people now do know her name. Cressida Campbell's paintings, the full breadth, have become familiar and recognisable.

Campbell brushes off the recognition and says a lot of people brought the exhibition to life. It took effort, just like her paintings.

"Anything good usually does take a lot of work," she said.