GARRY SHEAD Australian, B. 1942

Purchased by the present owner from Michael Nagy Fine Art, Sydney, 1993

Private collection, New South Wales

Garry Shead, Archibald Prize-winner and one of Australia's leading contemporary figurative painters, first read the letters of D. H. Lawrence in the 1960s; and first painted around Thirroul, a village on the south coast near Sydney, in the 1970s. He was fascinated by Lawrence the writer, painter and adventurer: David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930), the fiery Englishman who lived for a short time at Thirroul with his wife Frieda in 1922 and wrote his autobiographical novel Kangaroo. 

In 1987 Shead and his wife Judith moved to a cottage on the coast at Bundeena, not far from Thirroul, where he conceived his remarkable series of paintings inspired by Lawrence. In The Sentinel, we see Lawrence and Frieda – or equally their alter-egos in the novel, Richard and Harriet Somers, and just as possibly Garry and Judith Shead – in a landscape that is recognisably Australian but also quite magical. As Dr Sasha Grishin explains, 'Garry Shead's Kangaroo series is a personal, intuitive response to the novel, rather than an attempt to illustrate Lawrence's narrative... The relationship is a tangential one, more of a perceived spiritual affinity and the notion of a shared common experience, than a text with its illustrations'.¹ 

Grishin has also written perceptively of Shead's visual inheritance from earlier artists including Marc Chagall, the early Arthur Boyd and, most notably, Sidney Nolan. Like Nolan, Shead has taken a story from Australian history and made it his own. Where Nolan recreated the mythology of Ned Kelly in his art, so Garry Shead transforms D. H. Lawrence and his 'Kangaroo'. 'The paintings have that wonderful ineffable quality of singing magic which runs from one work to the next, and which calls for the parallel with Boyd and Nolan. The artistic statement which Garry Shead makes in the Kangaroo paintings is one of provocative simplicity, wit and dramatic power’.²

1. Grishin, S., Garry Shead: The D. H. Lawrence Paintings, Gordon and Breach Arts International, Sydney, 1993, pp.12-13.

2. Op. cit., pp. 17-18.