The Second Awakening c1993

GARRY SHEAD born 1942

The Second Awakening c1993

oil on board
92.0 x 122.0 cm
signed lower right: Garry Shead
inscribed verso: The Second Awakening

Provenance:
Kenthurst Galleries, Sydney
Private collection, Sydney

Related Works:
The Awakening, 1993, oil on board, 91.5 x 122.0 cm, illus. in Grishin, S., Garry Shead: The D. H. Lawrence Paintings, Gordon and Breach Arts International, Sydney, 1993, pl.34 (illus. p.86)

Estimate: $85000 - 95000

Garry Shead is one of Australia’s most inventive and exciting contemporary artists. Admired as both a painter and printmaker, Shead’s work explores a distinctive fascination with the Australian landscape. An allegorical painter, Shead’s oeuvre is punctuated by a wide-ranging bank of memorable characters and series. Among his most recognisable and best-loved is the ‘Royal Suite’ series and the body of works inspired by D.H. Lawrence’s book Kangaroo, to which The Second Awakening 1993 belongs. 

Shead first encountered the English writer D. H. Lawrence in 1968 through an edition of published letters. The young Shead felt a strong affinity, both philosophical and spiritual with Lawrence, particularly through his letters inspired by a brief residency in Australia. In 1922 Lawrence and his wife Frieda lived for a short time at Thirroul, a suburb of Wollongong on the New South Wales south coast. It was here that Lawrence wrote Kangaroo, a novel about Australian fringe politics and the sources of power in marriage and society. Shead was deeply affected by Lawrence’s instinctive sympathy for the natural world and his articulation of the paradigm of dominance and submission, love and power. Lawrence became a spiritual mentor for Shead, his literature and paintings voraciously digested; indeed the young Shead on several occasions retraced the footsteps of Lawrence to Thirroul, most famously in 1972 accompanied by his friend Brett Whiteley.

Shead retained his interest in Lawrence during the subsequent years, particularly through the celebration of sexuality in his work, however it was some twenty-five years later that Lawrence emerged from Shead’s subconscious as an explicitly articulated source when Shead began the iconic Kangaroo suite of paintings. The series does not seek to illustrate Lawrence’s novel in a literal sense, but rather to celebrate it. The painter and the novelist had become ideological kindred. The result, for Shead, was a resolved, masterful series of paintings completed in six months in 1992, with several works added in 1993. ‘Everything just flowed, I didn’t have to push anything… Once the eyes started looking out, that’s when the painting became alive; they got a dynamic to them.’1

The Second Awakening depicts Wyewurk, the house in which Lawrence lived in Thirroul identifiable by its red tiled roof, open veranda and white rails. The background, geographically typical of the area, represents the meeting of mountains with sea. Wyewurk and the kangaroo, appearing consistently throughout the series, are its visual anchors. In The Second Awakening, the kangaroo is a rather voyeuristic presence, having caught the couple in what is generally a private moment. The identity of the couple is left deliberately ambiguous, but likely candidates are Kangaroo’s protagonists (Richard and Harriet Somers), Lawrence and Frieda, or Shead and his own wife Judith.

The artistic statement which Garry Shead makes in the Kangaroo paintings is one of provocative simplicity, wit and dramatic power. As with the Lawrence novel, you are left with the feeling that you have encountered something significant and powerful. In both there is a strong narrative where in a way nothing happens, but a lot of things should happen, and you spend years in your mind seeing them through to fruition.2

Footnotes

1. Garry Shead cited in Grishin, S., Garry Shead: the D.H. Lawrence Paintings, G+B Arts International, Switzerland, 1993, p.18

2. ibid, p.12

Alison Burns BA (Hons); MA