About
The
Dancing Lesson
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The Dancers series
of paintings
first appeared in the mid-nineties,
the series
serves as a metaphor for the dance of life and the path which a couple
must negotiate through life’s journeys.
The Dancing Lesson is a top-quality exquisite work of art,
painted with great attention to details, in superb tone
of ruby-reds, scarlet and crimson, bathed with subtle texture of the
light of sunlit yellow.
The Dancing Lesson
is tender, passionate and romantic.
With warm sensuousness through which the female flesh glows in a rich
radiance, Garry Shead achieves a great lyricism in the paint surface.
The female dancer is of great sensuous
beauty and lyrical charm
wearing scarlet lipstick and sexy high hills shoes.
The male dressed in an evening suit, in shy ecstasy,
besotted, is dancing with a beautiful female, almost nude.
The Dancers are
dancing and
kissing
in trance, with eyes closed, daydreaming in bliss and
delight.
The Dancing Lesson
painting reveals the door way, the
source of dynamic light. The indication of an open door is a path to
free will and leisure pursuits. Increasingly these intimate interior
settings allude to full of life seductive dream-like reality where ideas
and interpretations can float free from gravity and verbal associations
into trance of ecstasy.
The Dancing Lesson
painting takes the
viewer on a journey to pleasure
activity
considered being of a private nature.
The couple is unaware of being observed and the
viewer becomes the voyeur.
There is a strong
aspect of erotic wish-fulfilment and a hint of a more metaphysical
dimension, relating it to
the dance of life.
The Dancing Lesson is performed on an allegorical stage like the arena of life.
Shead’s DH Lawrence series of the early
1990s
appeared as a single breath of creation, as he later observed:
“Everything just flowed, I didn’t have to push anything … Once the eyes
started looking out, that’s when the paintings became alive, they got a
dynamic to them.” The brilliance and success of this series in
part reflects the richness of the associations which it evokes. Set
within the recognisable Australian coastal scrubland, the paintings
neither narrate episodes in Kangaroo, nor the experiences of Lawrence
and his wife Frieda in Thirroul, but create a rich and ambiguous fabric
of vision. They are wonderfully vivid allegorical paintings. The
ubiquitous kangaroo and the voyeuristic magpie which occur in many of
the works may refer to what Lawrence termed the strange “invisible
beauty of Australia, which is undeniably there, but which seems to lurk
just beyond the range of our white vision”.
The Royal Suite series of
paintings was created between 1995 and 1998,
the historical reference may be to the white goddess of Australia and
the visit of Queen Elizabeth II in 1954, but the paintings touch on a
much broader frame of reference. The queen, accompanied by her lecherous
consort, encounters Blinky Bill koalas, emus, kangaroos and ceremonial
Aboriginals, while she knights merino sheep on red carpets before her
wide-eyed subjects. The series may be interpreted as part of the
republican discourse, a post-colonial critique of British occupation of
Australia and the reconciliation movement with our indigenous peoples,
but also in part it expresses our yearning to believe in myths and fairy
tales.
The Dancers
series
of paintings
first appeared in the mid-nineties,
the
dancing
series
serves as a metaphor for the dance of life and the path which a couple
must negotiate through life’s journeys.
It is as much about love and tenderness, about passion and desire, as it
is about voyeurism and erotic wish-fulfilment.
In
Dancers, Garry Shead achieves a great lyricism in the paint surface, a
warm sensuousness through which the female flesh glows in a rich
radiance.
The Dancers series is
evidently tender, passionate and romantic and it is one of the most
exquisite series of paintings that the artist has done. The female
dancer is of great sensuous beauty and lyrical charm wearing scarlet
lipstick and sexy high hills shoes. The male dressed in an evening suit,
in shy ecstasy, besotted, is dancing with a beautiful female, almost
nude. They are sometimes kissing and dancing in trance often with eyes
closed, daydreaming in bliss and delight.
The paintings repeatedly
reveal the door-way that is the source of dynamic light. The indication
of an open door is a path to free will and leisure pursuits.
Increasingly these intimate interior settings allude to full of life
seductive dream-like reality where ideas and interpretations can float
free from gravity and verbal associations into trance of ecstasy.
The paintings take the viewer
on a journey to take pleasure in
activity considered being of
a private nature. The couple is unaware of being observed and the viewer
becomes the voyeur.
There is a strong aspect of erotic wish-fulfilment and a hint
of a more metaphysical dimension, relating it to the dance of life. The
couple Dance is performed on an allegorical stage like the arena of
life.
More recently
Shead created the 'Ern Malley' series of paintings.
Ern Malley series is a
culmination of several years of thinking and artistic experimentation
inspired by the poems of Australia’s most enigmatic poet. While it has
been argued by some that Ern Malley and the 16 poems which comprise The
Darkening Ecliptic are simply a literary hoax designed to discredit
modernism, Shead through his paintings, drawings, collages, etchings and
ceramics argues that the poems are greater than the conscious petty
intrigues of their authors and have created in the Australian psyche the
image of the creative individual and his precarious path in a
materialistic world. Arguably these are some of his most wonderful and
evocative paintings to date.
In 1993 Shead was awarded
the Archibald Prize and in 2004 the Dobell Prize for drawing. Shead belongs to that group of figurative artists who included his
friends Brett Whiteley
and Martin Sharp, who were not swept up by the
trend towards abstraction which was dominating the Sydney art scene.
Like them, Shead initially found more favour with the public, than with
critics, curators and the institutionalised art establishment.
Garry
Shead
is a brilliant and expressive
painter as well as printmaker and his etchings can be acquired through
galleries or dealers generally under $3,000. His drawings are still
relatively modestly priced, starting at $4,400 in galleries but
generally achieve higher prices at auctions.
Garry Shead oil paintings are
exclusive, chic and pricey and are likely to appreciate much more.
At exhibitions
Philip Bacon in
Brisbane,
Australian Galleries Sydney and Melbourne and
also
Paul Greenaway
in Adelaide Shead oil paintings range in price from $165,000
to $380,000. And apparently most Garry Shead exhibitions sell out very
quickly.
Garry Shead Prices at
Auction
Shead’s prices have grown dramatically in years. While Garry Shead’s
work appears frequently at auction, generally it has been the small oils
or works on paper and not the huge recent major paintings which have
achieved top dollar prices. Garry Shead’s work has a reputable presence
in the secondary market. His modest size canvas ‘The Dance’ sold at
Lawson-Menzies in 2003 for $143,100 while another relatively small
canvas ‘The secret’ sold at Christies in 2003 for $129,500
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