Up the steep, original cedar staircase of Robert Eadie’s inner-eastern, three-storey 1860s Sydney terrace home, past his abstract, shimmering canvases in the hallway and cane sculptures hanging from the ceiling, lies the artist’s first-floor studio, dappled in dusky morning light, filled with decades of paintings and drawings.

The 83-year-old, who taught for 20 years at his nearby alma mater, the National Art School in the former colonial sandstone Darlinghurst jail, where he rose to become head of drawing and painting in the mid-1980s, remarks on two decades of his related works, the ones depicting coastal sunsets, which are resting on the old floorboards against one wall.

“It’s not a deliberate series,” he says of these images of Narrabeen beach in northern Sydney, where he once prodigiously surfed. A more recent series of suns drawn en plein air in Centennial Park amongst a small group of artist comrades are, by contrast, an intentional sequence.

Works from the second half of Eadie’s 60-year career are by necessity smaller in size than before: one day, in 1989, at age 47, everything changed in his world. Earlier that year, Eadie had just left his art school position, fired by ambition to devote himself more fully to his artmaking. Taking an artist-in-residence position in Canberra, he went to dinner one night and woke up in hospital three days later, attached to life support.

Eadie has only a vague memory of the room taking a funny shape, sound becoming distorted, and at some stage, the cold, hard feel of a footpath. He had suffered a stroke, which he only learned years later was likely genetic. “Everything was like dreams,” he recalls. “My brain worked but my body didn’t, sadly.”

The left side of Eadie’s body was partially paralysed. At first in a wheelchair and then for six years on walking sticks and a leg calliper, he could no longer tackle big canvases, paint a mural or work on a theatre set.

Memory issues meant he had to rediscover what oil paint was, right down to relearning the names of paint colours. “I had to relearn to use a lot of stuff and learn to use my body. It was there, inside my head; I had just lost the pathway to it.”

Yet there was never any question he would give up creating art. The materiality just became smaller: he thinks of his smaller canvases of the past 35 years now as akin to panels to be joined together, like a comic strip.

Today, Eadie walks with a slight lean, but can navigate the two flights of stairs here. How did the stroke change him as a person? “My world became much more internal, so the external world of having a good time and parties changed. Romping with my children, wrestling with them on the ground, that changed. I couldn’t do it.”

In the adjoining spare room where his three-year-old granddaughter, Vera, sometimes sleeps, dozens of Eadie’s head-and-shoulder portraits of family members line the walls.

“When she was only two, she was afraid [at night], because [her] mum and dad were upstairs, so I put all these up. I said, ‘these are people who love you’. These are her family. Some are dead, but they are all related to her.”

Having regained “95 per cent” of his memory and mobility after the 1989 stroke, Eadie suffered another small stroke earlier this year, which left him “a bit off”.

A renewed sense that life is finite and the urgings of his three adult children and grandchild has led to his first solo show in a decade: a retrospective named Strange Light, showcasing his six-decade career.

“They said, ‘You must do it, while you’re still here’ and they could talk to me about the work,” he says. “But I must say this: I’m just Dad. I’m not something special at all. I’ve accepted that. I’m very proud of what they have done. I’m not very proud of [my art] work as such; that’s what I do. But I’m proud of them, and to know that they are proud of me. It’s a mutual thing, and it’s quite extraordinary.”

Eadie says his artwork “has very little relevance to me anymore, from a person who was ambitious to a person whose life is now mostly internal. If somebody wants to pay for it, that’s their business. It’s not my business.”

Strange Light
Robert Eadie
Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf
On now—1 September