| Bush, Jack Hamilton (1909-1977) , Canadian painter, best known for his brightly colored abstract works. Bush was born in Toronto, Ontario, but grew up in Montréal, Québec, studying with local painters from 1926 to 1928. He returned to Toronto in 1928 to work as a commercial artist and enrolled in evening art classes at the Ontario College of Art, where he studied until 1939. Bush’s small landscapes of the 1940s follow in the tradition of a group of Canadian landscape painters of the 1920s and 1930s known as the Group of Seven. Their paintings celebrated the beauty of the Canadian wilderness. In the early 1950s, inspired by the work of Canadian painters Jock MacDonald and Paul-Émile Borduas, Bush began to experiment with abstract compositions. In 1953 he joined a group of abstract painters in Toronto known as the Painters Eleven. This group invited American art critic Clement Greenberg to Toronto to visit their studios in 1957. Greenberg was an advocate of color-field painting—a style that employs bright, pure (unmixed) color and has no figurative elements. Bush was encouraged by Greenberg to begin producing more simply structured, abstract paintings that focus primarily on the interaction of colors, resulting in such works as Painting With Red (1957, Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Ontario). He continued to pursue this direction throughout the 1960s. Dazzle Red (1965, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto), with its roughly brushed bands of joyous, pure color, recalls the color sense of French painter Henri Matisse. These color-field paintings gave Bush an audience in the United States as well as in Canada and are among his most successful works. In his paintings of the 1970s he set brightly colored abstract forms against dark, roughly textured backgrounds. Bush accumulated many honors during his career. He served as president of the Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour and in 1976 was named an officer of the Order of Canada. The largest collection of Bush’s works is that in the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. |
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