Robert Eadie show, Strange Light at the Woolahra Gallery

When one of Australia’s most successful artists was left partially paralysed by a near-fatal 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 five-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.

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.

“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 of my life. Of course, I mourned the man I had been, but this was the compensation.”

Eadie, 82, who’d been a prominent fixture on the Australian art scene from the 1960s to the late 1980s, is now finally making his re-entry into the art world.

With thousands of completed works scattered through every room of his rambling Darlinghurst terrace house to choose from, his first major exhibition in more than a decade, Strange Light, is to take place at The Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf from August 14 to September 1.