Jack Bush

Life & Legacy

Jack Hamilton Bush (March 20, 1909 – January 24, 1977) was a Canadian abstract painter. A member of Painters Eleven, his paintings are associated with the Colour Field movement and Post-painterly Abstraction. Inspired by Henri Matisse and American abstract expressionist painters such as Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, Bush encapsulated joyful yet emotional feelings in his vibrant paintings, comparing them to jazz music. Clement Greenberg described him as a "supreme colorist", along with Kenneth Noland in 1984. Bush explained that capturing the feeling of a subject rather than its likeness was a hard step for the art loving public to take, not to have the red look like a side of a barn but to let it be the red for its own sake and how it exists in the environment of that canvas.