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Faced with significant challenges, prolific Adelaide artist Jungle thrives painting joyful works
Creating art has helped prolific Adelaide painter Jungle stay alive.
The iconic artist has painted thousands of works, brimming with colour and words of positivity.
"I love to create, I love making art to give people great joy. It's all about love and hope and dare[ing] to dream," he tells ABC Arts.
"My job as an artist is to create joy … that's why I only use bright and happy colours. It brings a smile to your face."
But Jungle's relentlessly colourful paintings may also be an attempt to dilute his own pain.
And Jungle, aged 68, carries a lot of it: he grew up with an abusive father, witnessed his brother's death and he acquired a brain injury through an accident in the late 1990s.
He's also living with terminal liver cancer and his doctor says they've "run out of options".
At each challenge, art has intervened.
"It got me through. I learned to be me doing the art."
He describes it as his "backbone".
"It helps me," he says.
"He kind of uses painting as a way to create his Utopia, his dream world," says fellow SA artist Henry Jock Walker.
"It's probably like an escapism because he has had a pretty rough ride. [It's] … a way to get out of the memories."
Driving along Adelaide's busy Marion Road, Jungle's house is unmistakable: bright, smiling artworks line the fence and fill the front yard.
And stepping inside his house, the boundaries between home, studio and gallery become quickly blurred.
Every wall, and even the ceilings, are coated with Jungle's distinct art. His velvet jacket, vest, hat and shoes are bright with splashed-on paint.
"The whole place is a work of art … [a] living, breathing, work of art. I live here [but] it's open to the public, it's public art."
Jungle paints most days, mostly using acrylics. When I visit, he's working on two family-portrait commissions; a mum and dad looking over three children, "guiding them throughout the ages of time of life".
Painting "makes me happy, makes me feel nice", Jungle says.
He doesn't usually paint on an easel, but has the canvas lying down — "because it's a lot better, the paint doesn't run".
And he doesn't set out knowing what he's going to paint.
"I just let it evolve … I do a base shape and let it take its own life form.
"Sometimes I lose track of time and just paint. Now, because of the cancer, I work a bit, have a lie down, and then do a bit more."
We're chatting about Jungle's process in his kitchen. Instant coffee and medications line the counter, cupboards are painted with boxy-smiling figures — inspired by Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly series.
The red kitchen table is pressed against a pink wall, inscribed with phrases like 'BEE STRONG' and 'DARE TO DREEM'.
Henry Jock Walker is joining us, sitting in the corner as we chat. He's also a gallerist, passionate supporter of local neurodivergent artists and, importantly, a long-time Jungle fan.
He's been visiting Jungle for years, and they're mid-way through holding a "retrospectacle" of Jungle's art at the gallery Walker runs, Good Bank Gallery in McLaren Vale south of Adelaide.
"I'm a real process-of-painting lover," Walker says.
"What's awesome about [Jungle's] work [is] you can see the dry marks, you can see the drips, you can see the confidence of his mark-making.
"Anyone that's a real painter would love his work, because you can see all the happy accidents."
Walker sees Jungle as "a painters' painter".
"Just the positivity and the brightness and the confidence of his imagery and repetition — I think there's a lot of things that run through all of his work."
The Good Bank exhibition showcases some of the major themes Jungle returns to again and again in his art, like faces with wild, circular eyes and depictions of flying cars.
Jungle is also known for his "cut-outs" made from wood, that he shapes with his jigsaw tool and paints, a technique he also uses for his "totem poles" — tall pieces of wood topped with a cross shape.
"They look like railway crossings, but actually they're stars in the heavens and people in the heavens; me and Fran in the heavens, looking over the people," Jungle says.
Fran is Jungle's muse, friend and rock'n'roll dance partner, and she features in a lot of his paintings.
"This one here, Da Vinci's flying car, Fran and I did together. I'm saying, 'We are the future, we create the future.'"
Artists like Jungle, who are living with mental or physical illness and are self-taught, are often referred to as "outsider artists".
But Walker prefers the terminology "art brut".
"It actually means raw if you translate it, it's French," he says.
"It just refers to people that are making art outside of institutions; they haven't gone to university, they might not be part of any kind of commercial gallery.
"Like, for Jungle, he's just making art for the people. He's stoked if he sells a work, or people love it, [but] he's still selling his paintings from his house for 10 bucks each.
And while Jungle's work might look simple, Walker says that's what is great about it.
"It's very raw, honest and beautiful.
"It's simple in the best way possible."
Jungle has been creating since he was young, when he and his brother would make push bikes, cars and billy carts together.
This creativity offered an escape from home.
"Home was hard, it was harsh. I had a father that drank and gambled and [I] was abused on a daily basis, with bashings and put-downs and ridicule. [It] went on for a long time, for years," Jungle says.
For a few early years he was drawn into the bikie scene in Melbourne. It's where he got the nickname Jungle.
"I don't discuss that, but I was in it," he says.
And then he found art.
"I left [the bikies] in 1991 to kind of escape and change … It wasn't me being me.
"Through the art, I learned to be myself."
Jungle says he first started making art after he witnessed his brother Steven's suicide in 1978.
Soon after, he went to a psychiatric centre in Victoria, and it's there that he started drawing in coloured pencils. The nurses would buy his drawings.
And when he moved to Adelaide in 1991, Jungle "started a new life".
Here he was introduced to painting by artist and friend Tony Waite.
"He got some paints and canvases and started me painting, taught me the techniques and stuff. Then I learnt just by doing it with these palette knives, fingers, sponges, brushes, all kinds of things."
He even experimented painting with sticks, inspired by one of the art greats.
"Salvador Dali had a brush with one hair on it and I thought, 'Oh, I'll do that.' So I bought a brush and cut it up and then I got a stick off a tree and cut it into like a brush, into a point and used it for detail."
His art-making became prolific after an accident in 1999, when he was hit riding his push bike. He sustained a serious brain injury. (He also had his spleen removed and "almost died".)
It made him more committed to being an artist.
In the early days, he'd make "100 [paintings] at once … [I] had them all lined up everywhere".
"In 2005, I slowed down to about 20 at a time, and now I paint about five or three at once."
He took inspiration from some of his favourite artists: Picasso, Dali, Arthur Boyd, Sydney Nolan and Ian Fairweather.
He says he "started off doing sadness" in his painting, painting demons and angels but, over the past two decades, that tone has shifted.
"[For] 20-odd years [there] have been big, happy faces smiling … standing tall and looking forward to hope and love."
When I later visit the gallery with Walker, it becomes clear that the longer you spend with Jungle's works, the more layers of meaning emerge.
"They're bright colours, but sometimes they still have a scary presence, [and] it's actually really confronting for some people," Walker says.
"When people are just true artists and they're just painting real life as they're experiencing it ... there's going to be positive and negative in that space."
Today, the schizophrenia that Jungle lives with can sometimes cause him to hear different voices in his head.
"Sometimes that gets really bad for him, to a place where he has to go to hospital," Walker says.
"I think his painting is a mechanism to get himself away from the negative voices as well, or the scary voices … He doesn't paint anything scary anymore. He used to paint the scary stuff, probably as a way to process it, but now he just likes painting happy things."
His work has been celebrated in South Australia — where he's become a local art icon and regular exhibitor at the South Australian Living Artists (SALA) Festival — and also beyond.
In 2017, he was a finalist in the National Self-Portrait Prize alongside leading Australian artists like Karla Dickens, Vincent Namatjira and Ramesh Mario Nitheyendran.
In 2005, he was the the first Australian selected to exhibit at the prestigious Musée de la Création in Bordeaux.
But selling work and making money has never been the most important thing for Jungle.
"It's good to sell them. That's all good. But the creating part of it is what it's all about. And I'll be doing it my whole life ... until I'm unable to do it.
"I'm lucky I've got a big imagination … I'm lucky to be able to imagine and create."
Jungle's work will be featured in the Good Bank Gallery Garage Sale in McLaren Vale, South Australia, on June 14.
