Ochre Blue Square, 1962

Collection of the artist Estate of the artist Miriam Shiell Fine Art, Toronto Wallace Galleries, Calgary Private Collection, Calgary

Jack Bush: peintures des années ’60 et ’70/Jack Bush: Paintings of the 60s and 70s, Galerie Dominion, Montreal, 1990, no. 11

Marc Mayer, “Jack Bush: A Double Life,” in Jack Bush, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 2014, page 21 Charles W. Millard, “Jack Bush in the 1970s”, in Jack Bush, Karen Wilkin (ed.), Toronto, 1984, page 48 Kenworth W. Moffett, “Jack Bush in Retrospect”, in Jack Bush, Karen Wilkin (ed.), Toronto, 1984, page 34

Departing in the late 1950s from an Abstract Expressionist technique that had featured broadly outlined forms executed in thickly applied, modulated pigments, Jack Bush transitioned to a more personal idiom that would become his signature style: systems of clearly defined, repeating geometric forms rendered in flatter, more idiosyncratic shades. Though this consistent technique would become synonymous with the artist’s mature period, an examination of his practice at the outset of the 1960s reveals that the adventurous spirit and penchant for diversity that had characterized the artist’s previous decade, while refined considerably, had not waned. As scholars of his work have often noted, Bush’s paintings of the 1960s and 1970s differ from those of many of his contemporaries for their “typological variety.” Marc Mayer explains that, unlike the work of American painters Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko, who tended to adhere more closely to signature styles, Bush’s oeuvre constitutes a series of experimental phases after 1960. Working through a number of “coherent sets of non-representational picture ideas separated by hybrid moments of experimentation,” Bush’s imagery and formal approaches would occasionally overlap, succeeding each other “anarchically and anachronistically” as the artist negotiated between past and current developments. Reminiscent of the concepts Bush had begun to explore in his assertive Thrust paintings of 1959, which had been the subjects of his first solo exhibition in New York City at the Robert Elkon Gallery in 1962, “Ochre Blue Square” also foreshadows the artist’s rectilinear Flags of 1962-63. A seeming union of the two motifs, the composition recedes into a central vertical band of dense black oil pigment surrounded by a thinner green which hints at the acrylic washes and earth tones of subsequent years. The translucent ochre and blue paint applied with a brush to the titular square foreshadow the effects Bush would achieve with water-based acrylics after his switch to the medium in 1966, though, as Charles W. Millard notes in his discussion of Bush’s works from the early 1960s, in his earlier canvases the effect derives from pigment residues in his thinned oils and the surface texture of the support itself. As Bush transitioned to his subsequent “Sash” motif, Millard adds, forms increasingly shift and attach themselves to the edge of the canvas, “leaving a residual ground next to them [and] tightening the surface of the composition.” Kenworth W. Moffett posits that the Thrusts and Flags bear a strong resemblance to the abstraction of Henri Matisse, an artist whom Bush openly admired, explaining that works from this era draw from one of the French artist’s key organizational concepts; that is, establishing a bold figure-ground opposition in which a central rectilinear form appears ‘negative’ because it is either less painted or more evenly painted than its surrounds. With its crisp geometric planes, mottled application of pigment, and inverted figure-ground relationship, Ochre Blue Square of 1962 is an intriguing transitional work, one that synthesizes several of the artist’s most enduring experiments from the era. The preceding essay was written by Consignor Canadian Fine Art specialists. “Ochre Blue Square” will be included in the forthcoming “Jack Bush Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné”. We thank Dr. Sarah Stanners for providing cataloguing details related to the artwork.