Garry Shead is one of Australia’s most celebrated artists. He is represented in the National Gallery of Australia, all state galleries, many regional galleries and many other public collections in Australia and overseas. He has been the recipient of many awards, including the 1986 Mahlab Art Prize (New South Wales Law Society), the 1993 Archibald Prize and the 2004 Dobell Prize for Drawing. 

The D.H. Lawrence series of paintings are among the most important of Garry Shead’s career. As Sasha Grishin explains, in 1968 Shead discovered an edition of the letters D. H. Lawrence had written from Australia in 1922. 'This first encounter with Lawrence grew into an obsession, so that Garry Shead not only eventually read everything which Lawrence had ever written, but also later studied and re-interpreted many of Lawrence's paintings, and retraced the author's footsteps to Thirroul on the south coast near Sydney, where Lawrence lived with his wife for a couple of months in 1922 and wrote the novel Kangaroo.' 

Reference: Grishin, S., Garry Shead: The D. H. Lawrence Paintings, G + B Arts International, Basel, 1993, p.7