Garry Shead

Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane
Private collection, Brisbane; purchased from the above in 1993
Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above 2003

Sasha Grishin, Garry Shead: The D.H. Lawrence Paintings, Sydney: Craftsman House, 1993, p. 15, pl. 19 (illus.)

Reverse is sealed with a foam core backing. The painting is framed in a stepped and rounded frame which is in good condition. There is a minor scuff to the kangaroo (between leg and tail). No major scuffs or scratches to the surface. This work is in good condition.
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The profound influence of the English writer D.H. Lawrence on the Australian painter Garry Shead began in 1967 when Shead read Lawrence's letters while in the Sepik Highlands, Papua New Guinea.  Lawrence soon became something of an obsession.  Shead read all of Lawrence's novels, studied and re-interpreted a number of Lawrence's paintings and, in 1969, followed his hero's journey to Thirroul.

In 1922 D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda had spent a few months in the New South Wales south coast town, and it was here that Lawrence wrote his novel, Kangaroo.  To Shead, Lawrence was something of a kindred spirit; the writer's response to the Australian landscape matched Shead's own, and for both artists the erotic was a profound and central impulse.² 

The impact of Lawrence on Shead was transformed from a literary influence to painting in 1972 with the work D.H Lawrence in Thirroul.  The following year he completed a collaborative work with Brett Whiteley titled Portrait of D.H. Lawrence (1973, University of Western Australia), both hoping to explore the problem of 'What D.H. Lawrence saw that afternoon on the beach at Thirroul, when he walked to think about the book he was writing, Kangaroo.' ³

For Shead, the question remained hanging for almost twenty years, before being resolved in his D.H. Lawrence series, begun conceptually in late 1991 and finished in 1993.  The Lawrence pictures, even more than the previous Outback and Bundeena paintings, were a tremendous success.  From June 1992 to December 1993, no fewer than seven exhibitions of the paintings of the Lawrence paintings were held, in Canberra, Wollongong, Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne and at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.  A selection of works was also exhibited in London in 1994.  While the series is broadly influenced by Lawrence's book, each painting is an independent vignette acts as a moment of departure from the book.  Lawrence's own description of his novel as a 'thought adventure ... where nothing happens and such a lot of things should happen' fits well with Shead's series.

The Letter is just such an adventure.  The figures of Lawrence and Frieda (or Shead and his wife Judit) stand, firmly fixed together, both staring straight ahead except for the slightly wandering eye of the husband. Over the couple looms the figure of  Benjamin Cooley, the 'Kangaroo' of the novel, a presence which is both slightly dangerous and seductively reassuring. The kangaroo stands behind the couple, perhaps protecting them from the postman and his letter or perhaps (like the Sydney Opera House roof of the house) as a reminder to the couple that they are in a foreign land. 

While the title suggests an episode in a story, the painting's structure denies us any firm grasp of what has occurred and what will happen next.  Shead's painting trembles and pulses with narrative and erotic suspense.

1. Sacha Grishin, Garry Shead and the erotic muse, Sydney: Craftsman House, 2001, p. 94
2. ibid., p. 11