{"id":265850,"date":"2025-11-06T05:38:20","date_gmt":"2025-11-06T05:38:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/265850\/"},"modified":"2025-11-06T05:38:20","modified_gmt":"2025-11-06T05:38:20","slug":"adelaide-artist-peter-jungle-phillips-dies-aged-69-in-his-gallery-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/265850\/","title":{"rendered":"Adelaide artist Peter ‘Jungle’ Phillips dies aged 69 in his gallery home"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter “Jungle” Phillips \u2014 a much-loved “outsider artist” whose work continues to grow in popularity \u2014 has died in Adelaide at the age of 69 from liver cancer.<\/p>\n

His house on Marion Road is well-known as an open gallery that bursts at the seams with colourful portraits and pieces in the place of furniture.<\/p>\n

Friend, theatre director and ABC presenter Peter Goers described Phillips as the “sweetest man I’ve ever known in my life”.<\/p>\n

“And so generous. He’d give pictures away,” he told ABC Radio Adelaide<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“He always said the most important thing is ‘heart, and that’s what I do. I paint with my heart.'”<\/p>\n

Outsider artists are those who are largely self-taught or developed their skills outside traditional establishments and without traditional tutors.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Peter “Jungle” Phillips’s home was an art gallery into which he welcomed people. (ABC Arts: Eloise Fuss)<\/p>\n

Goers said Phillips had a “very hard life”.<\/p>\n

“Raised in Hobart, he suffered a lot of abuse as a child, escaped to Melbourne, and became a bikie.<\/p>\n

“The bikies gave him the nickname ‘Jungle’ because he was ‘thick and dense’, and he loved that name.”<\/p>\n

Phillips told the ABC earlier this year that his home life in Hobart<\/a> had been “harsh”, with a father who drank, gambled, and abused him on a “daily basis, with bashings and put-downs and ridicule”, and it went on for years.<\/p>\n

He said he was later drawn into Melbourne’s outlaw motorcycle gang scene.<\/p>\n

“I don’t discuss that, but I was in it,” Phillips said.<\/p>\n

Phillips said he first started making art after witnessing his brother commit suicide in 1978.<\/p>\n

Artist uses painting to find hope<\/a><\/p>\n

Jungle could once paint around 100 works in one sitting. Today he’s a little slower, but his joyful expression on canvas hasn’t diminished.<\/p>\n

Soon afterwards, in a Victorian psychiatric centre, he started drawing in coloured pencils, and the nurses would buy his work.<\/p>\n

He eventually moved to Adelaide in 1991, where he was introduced to paints and canvases by his artist friend Tony Waite.<\/p>\n

“I left [the bikers] in 1991 to kind of escape and change \u2026 It wasn’t me being me,” Phillips said.<\/p>\n

A change through colour<\/p>\n

Goers said Phillips “dried out” after coming to Adelaide.<\/p>\n

“Art changed his life,” Goers said.<\/p>\n

His output ramped up considerably after a bicycle accident in 1999 that left him with a brain injury.<\/p>\n

Phillips had previously said that he started painting “sadness”, drawing demons and angels into his work, but over two decades, the tone had shifted.<\/p>\n

“[For] 20-odd years [there] have been big, happy faces smiling \u2026 standing tall and looking forward to hope and love,” he told the ABC in June.<\/p>\n

\"Abstract<\/p>\n

Fran was Peter “Jungle” Phillips’s muse, friend, and rock’n’roll dance partner. (ABC Arts: Eloise Fuss)<\/p>\n

Indeed, his Adelaide house is full of positive affirmations, encouraging people to dream and live with hope and love.<\/p>\n

It is a reflection of a man known for his kindness, generosity, and dedication to art for no other reason than his own innate creativity.<\/p>\n

“Toward the end, he was selling like hot cakes. People were coming from Sydney to buy his work,” Goers said.<\/p>\n

“I said, ‘Jungle, you’re selling so well, you should have died years ago,'” he added with a laugh.<\/p>\n

“But I never knew him to complain \u2014 not even in the agonies of cancer, did he ever complain.”<\/p>\n

\"Man<\/p>\n

Peter “Jungle” Phillips in his kitchen on Marion Road earlier this year. (ABC Arts: Eloise Fuss)<\/p>\n

Phillips’s passing in his own bed and “beloved home and open gallery” was announced on Sunday by his friend and musician, Stewart Johnston.<\/p>\n

“Jungle had bravely accepted the inevitability of his illness, and maintained good spirits to the very end,” Johnston wrote on social media.<\/p>\n

“In spite of his own situation and the pain he was enduring, he showed more concern about the well-being of his friends.<\/p>\n

“An astonishingly kind, generous, and very decent human being. He will be greatly missed.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Peter “Jungle” Phillips \u2014 a much-loved “outsider artist” whose work continues to grow in popularity \u2014 has died…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":265851,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[64,63,1300,134,155407,30592,155404,155406,155410,155408,155409,155405,155411],"class_list":["post-265850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-death","tag-entertainment","tag-fran","tag-gallery","tag-jungle-phillips","tag-naive-art","tag-outsider-artist","tag-peter-goers","tag-peter-jungle-phillips","tag-peter-phillips","tag-tony-waite"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=265850"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265850\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/265851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=265850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}