Jack Bush (born 1909 in Toronto, Ontario) ran a commercial art business in Toronto and attended night classes at the Ontario College of Art in the 1930s, where he was primarily influenced by the Group of Seven. However, after seeing abstract work of Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis in Toronto and New York, Bush began to experiment with abstraction, a turn that would define his career as an artist during the 1950s to the 1970s. As a member of the Painters Eleven, he met the influential New York City art critic Clement Greenberg who encouraged him to simplify his compositions using all-over coverage of thinly applied bright colours, incorporating smooth opaque streaks of bars of colour or simple geometric shapes. Bush’s printmaking career included collaborations with the major dealers of the time: Leslie Waddington in London, Andre Emmerich in New York and David Mirvish in Toronto and are a translation of his painterly vocabulary onto a different medium.

Courtesy Miriam Shiell Fine Art, Toronto