Printmaking and drawing are integral to Garry Shead’s practice, providing both independent works and a means of exploring ideas that also appeared in his paintings. His prints range from intimate studies of human relationships to more elaborate compositions drawing on literature, mythology and the erotic imagination. Across the different media, he returns to recurring subjects, allowing figures and themes to develop through variations in pose, setting and treatment.

Some drawings explore ideas that subsequently appear in paintings, but many are independent works, or parts of sequences in which he develops a subject through successive variations. The Springwood series of 1999 – Springwood was the Blue Mountains home of the controversial artist Norman Lindsay – is a particularly interesting example. Across these drawings, figures, animals and landscape elements recur, but their arrangement and relationships shift from one image to the next. The scenes combine erotic encounters with a more unruly, bacchanalian atmosphere, as if the artist were exploring the possibilities of an imagined world rather than working towards a single finished composition.