GARRY SHEAD

Eva Breuer Art Dealer, Sydney
Fine Australian Art, Sotheby's, Melbourne, 19 September 2005, lot 53
Private collection, Sydney

When Garry Shead and his wife Judith first moved to Bundeena in New South Wales, on the southern shores of the beautiful Port Hacking, in 1987, they were surrounded on three sides by the Royal National Park – ‘where the forest meets the sea’. Shead exhibited works from his ‘Bundeena Series’ in 1990 and 1991; and The Threat, he says, is among the last of the group – in both style and content looking ahead to his later series based on D. H. Lawrence’s novel, Kangaroo. As Shead’s biographer Dr Sasha Grishin explains, the Bundeena paintings ‘are joyous images of fecundity, possibly inspired by the birth of the Sheads’ daughter, Lilla, possibly by the pastoral setting of Bundeena itself. Flowers, trees, currawongs and magpies are all closely observed… Possibly the greatest significance of this series of paintings is that by returning to nature and recoding it in a rather direct and non-literary manner, it opened the way for the "Lawrence" paintings’. ¹

Judith, née Englert, was Hungarian-born – they had met in Budapest –and an artist in her own right. For the first time in many years of travel, Shead had a real home base and entered into one of the most important and creative phases of his career to date. He had read Lawrence’s novel years before and first visited Thirroul in 1969 – where Lawrence had come to stay in 1922 with his German wife Frieda and written much of the semi-autobiographical Kangaroo. Now for Shead in the early 1990s, living on the same New South Wales coast with a European woman, his imagination began to conflate themes of Frieda and Lawrence, and Lawrence’s fictionalised protagonists Harriet and Richard Lovat Somers, with his and Judith’s relationship in the Australian landscape. ‘The presence of Shead’s wife, Judith, in the "Bundeena" pictures paved the way for the idea of a European woman… within the Australian bush’. ²

In The Threat, the red-haired European woman recoils from a bushfire crowning the hills not far away. Bundeena, with its proximity to the national park, is certainly bushfire-prone, having been threatened in 1985 and later in 1994 and 2002. As is well known, Australia’s first, indigenous people utilised and managed fire in the environment: burning to replenish and rejuvenate as they passed through their land year by year. For European Australians, in contrast, bushfire is always a threat: striking fear in our hearts and reminding us that we are never completely in control.

Garry Shead is one of Australia’s leading figurative painters, represented in the National Gallery of Australia, in leading state and regional galleries and in international collections. In 1993 he won Australia’s most prestigious portrait prize, the Archibald; and in 2004 the Dobell Prize, for drawing, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

We are grateful to the artist for assistance in cataloguing this work.

1. Grishin, S., Garry Shead and the Erotic Muse, Craftsman House, Sydney, 2001, p. 89.
2. Op. cit., p. 96.