Vic Day, 1974

The Artist, May 1974 

David Mirvish Gallery, Toronto, March 1975 

Ken Carpenter, Toronto 

By descent to the present Private Collection, Toronto

Ken Carpenter, 'The Evolution of Jack Bush', Journal of Canadian Art History IV: 2, 1977-1978, figure 10, pages 127-128 

'The Inspiration of Jack Bush', Art International XXI, no. 4 (July/August 1977), pages 25-26 

Sarah Stanners, Jack Bush Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 4: 1972-1977, Toronto, 2024, reproduced pages 244-245, no. 3.7.1974.28

As its title suggests, Vic Day was painted on Victoria Day, one of Canada’s most welcome holidays, since it signals the kickoff to better weather after the long haul through winter. Historically, the day is focused on a celebration of Queen Victoria, who was to Canada the “Mother of Confederation,” but the most common associations with Victoria Day tend to be fireworks and time spent with friends and family. However non-objective Vic Day appears to be, this painting points to Victoria Day not just by title, but as a subject. Bush’s most abstract paintings sometimes convey subject matter through shapes. This is most apparent in his Spasm series from 1969, where darts symbolize the sharp spasms which he felt in his chest as symptoms of angina. Vic Day, and other paintings like it from 1974, feature flatly coloured shapes that represent friends and family, though only privately to the artist. 

In conversation with Terry Bush, the artist’s youngest son, I came to better understand a short series of paintings from the spring of 1974 with titles such as Twosome and Foursome which, like Vic Day, present distinct, flatly-coloured shapes against a mottled ground produced with a roller brush. In the case of Twosome, the shapes look like the letters “G” and “L” which represent the artist’s friends Leslie and Gladys Wookey. In Foursome, two more figures enter the picture space, this time one is noticeably larger than the others, and pink, and the other is yellow. These two simpler shapes, which represent Mabel and Jack, join the reappearing “G” and “L” on this canvas, to unite the friend group. Seen in this light, the artist’s seemingly random shapes take on some personality. Could the shapes in Vic Day represent the artist and the people with whom he spent the holiday? Foursome was painted in March 1974, just two months before Vic Day, and they share the same tall shape near to a short yellow shape. Could they be abstract symbols of Jack and Mabel? In any case, that is, despite not knowing for sure if these shapes might represent the people in his life, quirky cyphers have always been viewed as markers of the artist’s brilliant individuality. 

Professor Ken Carpenter, who proudly owned Vic Day since 1975, saw the individuality of Bush’s work as an asset. In his article for Art International, titled “The Inspiration of Jack Bush”, published in the summer of 1977, Carpenter underlined this point with reference to an interview he had previously conducted with the artist: “Bush’s work always seems very personal, very much the work of Jack Bush. But that result was not something he explicitly intended: ‘Every time I showed a painting at one of those [group] shows, there it was: not like everybody else’s. The difference was Bush, and I couldn’t get rid of it fortunately’.” 

Other art critics and curators, such as Terry Fenton and Karen Wilkin, frequently used the term “eccentric” to describe Bush’s abstract paintings. While the hints of nature (or the observable world) in Bush’s abstract paintings made him appear somewhat out of sync with concepts of “purely” abstract painting, this characteristic was also his best quality, and one that was consistently seen throughout his oeuvre, but not in a practiced or formulaic way. As Carpenter stated, so succinctly, “One of the most important constants of Bush’s art is the tendency for the elements to have a life and freedom of their own.” Carpenter made this observation in another feature article on the artist, which he titled "The Evolution of Jack Bush," and published in the Journal of Canadian Art History, just a few months after his Art International article, which I quoted earlier in this essay. Carpenter outlines the connections between Jack Bush’s early representational art and his later abstract paintings, to suggest that there is an evolution observable in the artist’s work. For example, he correlates Bush’s 1955 painting Reflection, which features a blurry section achieved through dragged brushstrokes, with the roller ground seen in Vic Day. 

Being careful not to suggest that Bush expressed himself exclusively within his own off-beat language of art, Carpenter does outline the wider influence on the artist, especially concerning his blurred backgrounds, as seen in Vic Day. The key inspiration in this case is Hans Hofmann, who Jack Bush certainly admired; he even owned a painting by this father of Color Field art. Carpenter draws the comparison between Vic Day and a Hofmann painting from 1962, Memoria in Aeternum, in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York: 

“More particularly the importance of Hofmann lies in his fine sense of interval. If we compare Bush’s Vic Day 1974 with Hofmann’s Memoria in Aeterne [sic] 1962, we see that each has a rich complex of intervals: between the canvas itself and the field, between the field and the elements, and between the various elements themselves, where each of the intervals is felt and yet not to be defined. Everything breathes in a space that seems to exist in front of the canvas but without any part of the picture losing its organic contact with the surface.” 

Much of the power of Bush’s late abstract paintings lies in what Carpenter points to in this last sentence. Simply put, there is levity in an implied space (between the figure and the ground) which is actually flat as flat can be. But there is also nature in that space. In his summary paragraphs to “The Evolution of Jack Bush,” Carpenter noted: “While Bush remained close to nature, his chosen mode of mature work was high ‘modernist’ painting with all its rejection of the fullness and consistency of spatial clues such as are in keeping with a tactile or more naturalistic space.” That Bush struck a balance between observation and the pure invention of abstraction is remarkable, and Vic Day is a fine celebration of this feat. 

We extend our thanks to Dr. Sarah Stanners, an Adjunct Professor, curator, and author who recently produced Jack Bush Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné (2024), for contributing the preceding essay.