‘I like my landscapes to look as though they have been exposed to time and the elements like the landscapes they are derived from, hence my use of natural ochres, mineral sands, graphite, etc…’¹

Robert Juniper was one of the most successful Western Australian artists of the second half of the twentieth century. With his colleagues Guy Grey-Smith and Brian McKay, he founded the Perth Group in 1958, the state’s first artist-collective devoted to the active support of modernist art. International exposure soon followed, and by the early 1970s, his signature style of large landscapes seen from a high aspect was established. Depicted in washes of rich colour, both stained and brushed, his domains were populated by figures and structures he encountered throughout his extensive travels. Snowbirds, 1984, dates from a particularly fruitful period in his career when the artist was also undertaking a series of commissions for theatre productions, dance works, public buildings, book illustrations and even the altar of a country church. Featuring Juniper’s characteristic elevated perspective, the present work transforms the landscape into an almost cartographic field of richly worked blues, greys and whites – traversed by sinuous red lines and scattered geometric forms, while two stark white birds hover enigmatically above the terrain.

Born in the regional town of Merredin, Juniper’s parents took him to England while he was still young, where he undertook his art studies between 1943 and 1947 at the Beckenham School of Art. On his return to Western Australia, he began exhibiting in group exhibitions and moved to the nearby Darling Ranges, where the Grey-Smith family was already living. Inevitably, a strong friendship ensued, culminating in the formation of the Perth Group. In 1958, Rose Skinner opened Perth’s first properly commercial gallery, and the artist-collective held a series of sell-out exhibitions there before disbanding. Through Skinner’s auspices, Juniper subsequently participated in the groundbreaking Recent Australian Painting at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 1961, was featured in the Tate Gallery Exhibition of Australian Painting, which was shown in both England and Canada in 1963, and held what was probably the first solo exhibition in Japan by an Australian artist the following year. The connection had other rewards too, such as Juniper’s meeting and subsequent lifelong friendship with John Olsen, who recognised a kindred spirit in the tall Western Australian: ‘Humanly, aesthetically, we share many common views: a feeling for the uniqueness of the Australian landscape, its vast spaces (and) the richness of emptiness.’²

1. Robert Juniper, ‘Artist’s Statement’, Artist in Focus 2: Robert Juniper, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 1988
2. John Olsen, cited in Olsen, J., Drawn from Life, Duffy and Snellgrove, Sydney, 1997, p. 186

ANDREW GAYNOR