…”as good as anything in the Wynne Prize”
(Peter Kingston 2006)

Detail from Alpine Symphony by Joy JukunicAt the age of 66 Joy Lukunic is having her first solo exhibition. In 2005 she graduated with distinctions in the Advanced Diploma of Fine Arts course at Meadowbank Tafe, a course she began three years earlier and something she had promised herself she would do in her retirement.

Becoming is a collection of paintings in oil that taps into a strong tradition of Australian landscape art. Lukunic’s images reveal a natural world that is only partially visible – a world where clouds hang silently over scenes we vaguely recognise, but can’t precisely identify. Lukunic’s clouds and the mist that hovers around them invoke the ideas of transience and universality. “This world we live in defies our efforts to exactly define it and has a deeper meaning than we can ever articulate – we just don’t have the comprehension or awareness to understand the big picture.” (Lukunic 2005).

Although she works in the traditional landscape genre, Lukunic’s approach is most original – she observes her subject out of moving car and train windows. Taking a series of digital photographs, she then uses the computer to arrange her compositions. ” I use photographs to evoke memories of particular places and to remember the quality of the light and how colour and tone change at different times of the day.” (Lukunic 2005)

Like other landscape artists, Lukunic uses light as a metaphor for understanding: so that these veiled images are our search for the unknowable.
“We catch glimpses of the working of the universe, but full meaning eludes us.”
(Lukunic 2005)

Looking at one of Lukunic’s paintings invites contemplation of our humanness and our impermanence.

A celebrated Australian landscape artist himself, Peter Kingston very generously commented that Joy’s paintings were as good as anything in The Wynne Prize and encouraged her to enter a painting in 2007. Of her artistic style he said, “I feel envious of the effortlessness of these lovely landscapes; and of her intellectual motivation, the creation of product is not utmost in this talented artist’s mind.” (Peter Kingston 2006)