It was a trip to Japan that opened Robert Juniper’s eyes to the wonders of the Australian landscape.
ROBERT Juniper can trace his fascination with nature back to his childhood adventures and, now aged 82, this legendary Australian artist is still discovering new ways to capture the magic of the landscape on canvas.
Sitting at his dining table with the rich, green vista of Darlington spilling down the hill below, Mr Juniper explains how he experiments with new pigments mixed from Western Australia’s shimmering mineral sands and the rich, red earth of the Kimberley.
“The red from the Kimberley sparkles too, I just refine it and get all the pebbles and twigs out of it and use it,” Mr Juniper says.
“Mainly it’s because it’s a great colour to use and it’s been lying out on the ground for thousands of years, so it’s permanency is guaranteed.”
It’s hard to believe this soft-spoken man is one of Australia’s most iconic contemporary artists, sought after and admired for his work and its unique blend of figurative and landscape elements.
He added an Order of Australia to his achievements this year, but somehow manages to artfully steer the conversation away from his fame and back to his work.
It’s a career that seems to keep surprising this prolific and disciplined artist, who spends every morning working in his studio before retiring to the local pub, where he meets his friends – a group of kangaroos and a cocky – for lunch.
After a successful solo show at Greenhill Galleries in March, Mr Juniper is busy working on a collection for a Sydney show later in the year. And his eyes sparkle as he discusses the stained glass windows he designed for the newly opened Bunbury Cathedral.
These 16 striking religious works are laced with Mr Juniper’s quick and gently irreverent wit, with quirky references to Australian culture including a scene depicting Noah busy at his BBQ with the ark represented by a pearl lugger on the horizon.
These details – humanising elements – partly explain the power of Mr Juniper’s work.
His depictions of the landscape in all its mesmerising beauty are rich with life, even if those details are only shadows or signposts to history.
“I do like the idea of history and vanished civilisations or the nearest thing we have to that,” Mr Juniper says.
“When you go to some of the Goldfields towns ... and all that is left are things the vandals couldn’t knock down.”
It was running wild around C Y O’Connor’s visionary water pipeline in the 1930s that first ignited Mr Juniper’s love of nature.
He spent the best part of the year living with a handful of other workers’ families in makeshift camps along the course of the pipeline, while his father worked in the maintenance team.
He remembers it as an idyllic time spent exploring the flora and the fauna of the country, as well as trying to stay out of trouble and well clear of the snakes, spiders and frightening, flighty Bungarras.
But it was a trip to Japan more than 30 years later, during which that country’s ordered, manicured landscapes really opened Mr Juniper’s eyes to the untamed beauty of the Australian bush, and enabled him to shake off the cultural constraints of the ‘old country’.
After working on the pipeline, Mr Juniper’s father took his family back to England in the late 1930s, where Robert remained until 1949 when he returned to WA to work on a dairy farm in Cowaramup.
“Coming from England, where I had spent most of my youth, I found the Australian bush a bit scruffy,” Mr Juniper said.
“I didn’t really see the Australian landscape for its own beauty until I made a trip to Japan.”
It was around this time, Mr Juniper flew over the Pilbara for the first time, providing him with an evocative new perspective of this dramatic country and laying the foundation for his now internationally recognised style.
A stroke in 2002 left Mr Juniper’s left side weakened, and while it has stopped him building his own sculptural works, he now works in partnership with engineers to create these striking studies.
As for the future, Mr Juniper jokes that at his age you don’t make too many plans.
“I’ve already been named a living treasure, I’m not sure what that makes me when I die, maybe buried treasure.”
