Real with Jack (detail)

Acrylic on Raw Canvas, 48" x 60". This image, painted in early 2006, is an homage of sorts to Jack Bush, one of the Canadian Painters 11, abstract expressionists and colour field painters of the fifties and sixties. I have always greatly admired his work, and it was a thrill one day to look down from my loft and to see this lovely haphazard, yet colour-toned collection of objects sitting on the table. I deliberately kept the painting style loose and expressive, although Mr. Bush might actually be horrified, were he still with us, to see this painting, as he did not paint in quite such a realistic style, although to me his "Lilac" paintings are undeniably images of lilacs, even if they aren't realistically reproduced on the canvas. Painter Terry Fenton writes in an essay about Bush (see www.sharecom.ca/fenton/bush.html) that Jack Bush liked "pretty things" to abstract, so maybe he wouldn't have minded me using these pretty things as an homage to him.

There is an additional, installation view of this painting in the "October 2007 Exhibition at Mayne Island Library" gallery on this site. It shows the raw canvas border on the painting, another stylistic device used by Jack Bush.