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Robert Juniper is one of Western Australia’s leading landscape artists. He was born in Merredin, Western Australia, in 1929 and was recently honoured as a Living Treasure by the Western Australian government. In his work Juniper celebrates the uniqueness of the Western Australian landscape:

My aim is to express aesthetically, in an evolved and personal language, a pattern of ideas and memories; the haunting remoteness of the Western Australian landscape, timelessness and agelessness composites; the microscopic picture suggested by an insect’s wing, or the arbitrary bas reliefs made by grubs under tree bark.¹

In Ferns and flowers colour, texture and materials are used in a spontaneous manner, appearing light and unconstrained. The richly textured surface opens to reveal imprints of an earlier pattern overlaid with subtle colour notations. The nominal subject – abstractions of ferns, flowers and seedpods – serve as foil to the luscious surface. In this work Juniper references a psychological and pictorial interpretation of space, blending feelings about the landscape with precise observations of natural forms.

1 Robert Juniper, 1979, quoted in Ella Fry, Gallery images, Perth: St George Books, 1984, p52.

Text © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 2010