Essay
by Karen Wilkin

Jack Bush on Paper: A Selection

JACK BUSH(1909-1977) is best known for his large,
exuberant abstract paintings on canvas: idiosyncratic com-
positions distinguished by surprising shapes and unpre-
dictable orchestrations of radiant hues. Works such as
these assured the Toronto-based Canadian artist’s place in
the front ranks of the loosely associated abstract painters
who posited alternatives to Abstract Expressionism in the
1960s. Bush was included, for example, with Helen
Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski,
Sam Francis, and Frank Stella—among others—when
Clement Greenberg organized the prescient exhibition
Post-Painterly Abstractionfor the Los Angeles County
Museum in 1964. What linked this multi-generational,
notably diverse group was their common distaste for the
“painterly”—read “layered, wet-into-wet, gestural”—version
of Abstract Expressionism that had dominated the Ameri-
can art world since the 1950s. Rather than evoking exis-
tential angst and contingency, as Abstract Expressionism
did, “post-painterly” abstraction (later known as “Color
Field” painting) celebrated the expressive, associative, and
structural potency of color. Bush’s luminous canvases, with
their stacks and swoops of intense, unnamable hues clear-
ly sprang from similar impulses as those of his American
colleagues but if the way he constructed his paintings with
clearly bounded zones of unmodulated color seemed to
ally him with his friend Noland, his free-wheeling “imagery”
also made him seem close to Frankenthaler; like her, Bush
used often improbable sources within his everyday experi-
ence as points of departure, translating them into a lan-
guage of playful, energetic abstraction at once highly indi-
vidual and seamlessly connected with the history of mod-
ernism. “What I’d really like to do,” Bush famously said to
Noland, “is hit Matisse’s ball out of the park.” “Go ahead,”
Noland told him. “Matisse won’t mind at all.”

Yet Bush came relatively late to large scale painting on
canvas. His first art training and his first success, when he
initially began to exhibit in Canada, was with small scale
works on paper. An early career as a commercial artist pol-
ished his naturally fluent and accurate drawing, and made
him an accomplished painter in watercolor and gouache.
Like many aspiring Canadian artists of his generation, Bush
cultivated these skills at evening art classes, producing
“fine art” watercolors for his own pleasure and to advance
his ambitions as a serious painter. As a mature, interna-
tionally known artist, wholly committed to the formal possi-
bilities of abstraction and the emotional resonance of color
relationships, he continued to work on paper, chiefly with
gouache, for extended periods.

Working on paper, for Bush, was never secondary to
working on canvas. His gouaches were neither prepara-
tions for working at a larger scale, conceived as sketches
intended to be executed in some other medium, nor were
his paintings ever direct enlargements of compositions first
developed on paper. It’s true that working on paper fre-
quently played a significant role in the development of
Bush’s imagery and in the evolution of his paintings, but
working on canvas could also influence his paper works. If
he sometimes anticipated in his gouaches notions that he
later explored on canvas, he often recapitulated and
enlarged upon ideas that he first proposed in his paintings,
on paper, in an effort to see where they might lead. Per-
haps the most accurate description is to say that while the
gouaches are intimately related to Bush’s major paintings,
they are also independent, accomplished works of art in
their own right.

Bush often seems particularly inventive and especially
uninhibited on paper. Motifs that would engage him for
years often make their initial appearance under the liberat-
ing influence of working rapidly, in watercolor or gouache,
on a relatively small scale. On paper, he could quickly test
the limits of spontaneity and economy, in a watercolor such
as Red and Blue, 1961, (plate 2), creating drama out of an
encounter between a pair of urgently swirled, tensely relat-
ed discs of primary colors. Or (especially early in his career)
he could slowly develop a resonant configuration on paper,
gradually moving, step by step, from figuration towards
wholehearted abstractness. The dominant motif of one
Bush’s earliest major series of abstract paintings, the
Thrustsof the early 1960s, for example, had its origins in a
sequence of watercolors that began as simplified land-
scape and flower images in the late 1950s. The configura-
tion developed into such unequivocally abstract works on
paper as the explosive Late Summer No.1, 1961, (plate 3),
and finally made its appearance, on canvas, in a group of
works that expanded the implications of the Late Summer
series without precisely replicating their imagery..

These Thrust paintings were exhibited in Bush’s first
solo show in New York, at Robert Elkon Gallery, in 1962.
Because of the Elkon exhibition, Bush spent the month of
October 1962 in New York, staying at the Chelsea Hotel.
Eager to keep his rhythm of work going but deprived of his
usual studio and constrained by the limitations of the hotel
room, he was forced to paint on paper. He produced
approximately twenty five gouaches on 23rd Street, a
series of bold, improvisatory images including this exhibi-
tion’s Spindle (plate 5) and On the Way Back from Wash-
ington(plate 4), among others, all of which demonstrate
Bush’s rather uncanny ability to transform acutely observed
experience of actuality into apparently uncompromising but
remarkable animated abstract configurations.

Some of the Chelsea Hotel gouaches would provide
the basis for structures and “imagery” that Bush would pur-
sue for the next several years. The series includes, for
example, Red Sash with Black, (plate 6) probably the first
manifestation of a format of stacked, brilliant colors that he
would explore, with many variations, on paper and canvas
until about 1966. (Characteristically, this apparently
abstract image was triggered, Bush later revealed, by
something that caught his eye during his New York stay: a
Madison Avenue shop window display of a woman’s shirt
and voluminous skirt, cinched with a wide belt.) The Sash
motif and its permutations elicited some of Bush’s lushest,
most delectable paintings on canvas, as well as a series of
no less lush or delectable related gouaches. For all their
visual opulence, however, the Sashespainted on paper,
such as Nice Pink, 1965 (plate 1) or Untitled, 1965 (plate
7), tend to be sparer than the canvas versions. On paper,
each band of color is forced to carry considerable visual
weight and each nuance of edge or abutment is forced to
become eloquent. 

The relationship of Bush’s gouaches and his canvases
is so close that it is often difficult to determine which came
first, despite his meticulous dating and careful record-keep-
ing; his concerns appear to be identical, whatever his
medium. From September through November 1970, for
example, Bush painted a group of gouaches, such as Test
(plate 12) and Fast Break(plate 11) that develop more fully
the broadly brushed crisp and calligraphic figures that first
appear in canvases made earlier that year. Like the can-
vases, the gouaches oppose geometric and non-geomet-
ric shapes, deployed in sizzling colors, often against mot-
tled grounds. Yet the paper works are both freer and more
concentrated than the paintings they echo. Their intimate
size draws us close, so that we become particularly aware
of small variations of edge and surface, of eccentricities
and deliberate awkwardnesses of drawing.

In the spring of 1971, working on paper became
Bush’s dominant activity. In a burst of energy, he turned his
full attention to a large series of gouaches that celebrate
the end of winter and the return of leaves, flowers, color,
and milder air to Toronto. Bush was an avid gardener and
the lovingly cultivated shrubs and flower beds surrounding
his home frequently served him as sources of inspiration
for his palette and for shapes, even after he had dedicated
himself exclusively to working abstractly; the pivotal Thrust
series, for example, can be traced to early watercolors of,
among other things, a monumental tree trunk and a long
stemmed rose, and other “garden” configurations animate
some of his most energetic paintings of the early 1960s.
But in the spring of 1971, Bush seemed to respond to this
familiar source in unexpected ways, inventing in his
gouaches a new vocabulary of non-literal but potently
evocative shapes. The ebullient white scribble of Apple
Blossom Burst (plate 13), to name just one work in the
series, takes great liberties with actuality, distilling a sense
of energetic growth, light, and possibly even scent into a
single gesture whose speed and vitality serve as eloquent
equivalents of the artist’s intense feelings. A pale golden
cascade of spring blossom becomes an assertive, calli-
graphic loop in Forsythia, 1971 (plate 14). The “garden
gouaches” of 1971 are among Bush’s most abstract
works, despite their having been inspired by something he
cared about passionately.

This exhibition is, obviously, far from being a complete
survey of Bush’s lifelong enthusiasm for working on paper,
either in terms of chronology or of types of pictures. Yet
the limited number of examples on view make clear this
highly individual painter’s special gifts. His uninhibited,
spontaneous watercolors and gouaches bear witness to
his extraordinary sense of color, his generous drawing, and
his odd and engaging approach to structure. Bush’s works
on paper provide, as well, an additional benefit. They are
so energetic and direct that we feel that we are looking
over the artist’s shoulder, watching him think. This illusion
of privileged intimacy is not only a pleasure in itself but it
can also help to sharpen our perceptions and lead us to
make new discoveries in the works before us.

Karen Wilkin
New York, January 2009