A Western Australian artist, Robert Juniper was born in the country town of Merredin in 1929 and went to England in 1936, where he later studied industrial design and commercial art at Beckenham School of Art, Kent.

He returned to Australia in 1949, working for some time as a commercial artist in Sydney and Perth, finally settling in Perth and holding his first one-man show there in 1953.

Since then he has exhibited regularly and has been included in surveys of Australian art shown at the Tate Gallery and Whitechapel Gallery in London and in America and Canada.

Juniper has received a number of awards, among them the Perth Prize for Contemporary Art in 1954, and he shared this prize in two other years; also the Helena Rubinstein Prize, in 1959 and 1961; and the Wynne Prize in 1976 and 1980.

Travels in Japan may have influenced a quality of calligraphy in his work but his development has been mainly in Western Australia, where he has sought a poetic interpretation of the landscape.

He works in oils, watercolours, pen and wash, and has produced some sculpture in steel. He has also been involved in printmaking and has created several murals on commission for city buildings.

He was quoted as saying: 'My aim is to express aesthetically, in an evolved and personal language a pattern of ideas and memories; the haunting remoteness of Western Australian landscape, timelessness and ageless composites; the microcosmic picture suggested by an insect's wing, or the arbitrary bas reliefs made by grubs under tree bark; the hard dry native flowers or the striped rocks. People I see sometimes as phantoms passing through the static landscape and sometimes part of the landscape as solid as the rocks themselves'.1

'I like my paintings to look old and try to get them to have an aged look by working over the surface'.2

Ella Fry, Gallery Images, St George Books, Perth, 1984

References: 1 Lister Gallery Catalogue, Perth, 1979; 2 Sandra McGrath, The Australian, 3 October 1977.