Garry Shead Sasha Grishin

Garry Shead has known Sasha Grishin for around ten years. Grishin founded the Fine Art Program at the Australian National University in 1977 and is now a Reader in Art History there. He has published widely in both Australian and European art, and his books include Garry Shead: the DH. Lawrence paintings.

Grishin recently completed a new monograph of Shead and it was when he brought the manuscript to Sydney to take it to the publishers that Shead decided to paint him. ‘Sasha has analysed me so much and I felt that I knew him as well as he knew me,’ he says.

Sadly, Grishin’s daughter Natasha died last year at the age of 24, hence the anguished expression in the portrait. ‘He’s quite shattered,’ says Shead. ‘I didn’t try to get that but it does come through.’

Born in Sydney in 1942, Shead studied at the National Art School. He has been hung in the Archibald Prize on 13 previous occasions, winning it in 1993 with a portrait of Sydney publisher/writer Tom Thompson. He is also hung in this year’s Sulman Prize. This portrait of Grishin was highly commended by the judges.