Jack Hamilton Bush 1909 - 1977

Estate of the artist, courtesy of Miriam Shiell Fine Art

Painters  Eleven, whatever its virtues or sins, gave each of its members a push at a particular point in their life, and for Jack Bush that meant shifting from being a landscape painter in the style of the Group of Seven to a painter of abstraction. His landscape work as a young man, while he supported himself and his family as a commercial artist, was on a small scale and modest in its subjects. In the 1950s he began to see other possibilities for himself as an artist, and the formation of Painters Eleven gave him the opportunity he needed when he needed it. Jock Macdonald and Bush were the ‘grand old men’ of the group. As a consequence, they had the longest road to travel in light of the long apprenticeship they had served in other styles and traditions.

This large and ambitious canvas of 1960 was one of the critical stepping stones in Bush’s path to become the painter we think of him as today. He has confronted the issue of scale and format by tackling this large canvas and by dividing it, in an elementary way, into four rough segments. He has addressed the issue of maintaining interest and tension over a large area without resorting to fussy details that would compromise the basic simplicity of the whole picture. And finally, he has, intuitively, thrown in a sort of ‘klanger’, the off-kilter oval with its unusual green aura. This is an element that disrupts the painting and tends to throw it off balance. Yet it is also the one thing that catches our attention and makes one pause and think about how flat the canvas might be without it. In the end it doesn’t depreciate the canvas so much as retrieve it.

The rather simplistic division into four sections was something that Bush tried in a number of other paintings at this time, and most of them were successful, if in a slightly awkward way. However, these works certainly stand on their own as important works in his total production. And while that may be so, they also led him, inevitably and somewhat circuitously, toward a different kind of division and toward a greater range of softer colours that shortly became his signature Sash paintings of the mid and later 1960s. This rapid passage was a momentous one for Bush, both in its speed and its transformation of the ‘look’ of his paintings, but it would not have occurred without the the discoveries and lessons of the paintings he made in the late 1950s and the early 1960s.