Sold for: $49,250

PROVENANCE
Collection of Terry Bush, Toronto, 1973
Waddington Galleries, Toronto
Fine Canadian Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, November 7, 1996, lot 123, cover lot
Private Collection, Victoria

LITERATURE
Christine Boyaniski, Jack Bush: Early Work, Art Gallery of Ontario, 1985, see reproduction of similar work: Golden Fields, p. 13.
Jack Bush, Hudson Hills Press, New York, 1984.
Charles C. Hill, Canadian Painting in the Thirties, The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1975.
Paintings of the 1930s: Some Paintings and Events of the Period, National Film Board, 1977.
Fine Canadian Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, 1996, reproduced front cover

EXHIBITED
Ontario Society of Artists, 67th Annual Exhibition, 1939
Sixteenth Annual Ontario Society of Artists Travelling Show, 1944

Jack Bush first exhibited with the Royal Canadian Academy in 1930 and later in the decade he began to show with the Ontario Society of Artists. Through the 1930s he earned a living as a commercial artist and later as an illustrator. Influenced by painters such as fellow Canadians Carl Schaeffer, Charles Comfort and the Group of Seven, Bush has created a multi-layered painting in Green Lake Farm, 1939. The work evokes the dominant '30s theme of economic depression. The subject of the farm itself suggests Schaeffer's social realist paintings and the winding road trailing off to the right hints at the openness of some of the Group's landscapes. There is an obvious possibility that the work makes a political statement: the red barn and the golden star certainly have a commanding presence. The splash of gold in the bushy shrub to the right seems to convey, at once, the reality of a dying season and the promise of new growth. What the work does, however, is anticipate Bush's later use of juxtaposed swaths of colour placed in contrasting positions. The bright red of the barn pushing down towards the lower right is countered by the strong whites and greys of the fence posts and the rugged road struggling to clear a path up and out of the same area. Thus, while there appears to be little realization of the style and subject matter of his abstracts of the 1960s, Green Lake Farm provides a hint of Bush's artistic future with its characteristic reds, gold and greens.

The above essay was provided by Heffel. This work will be included in Dr. Sarah Stanners’s forthcoming Jack Bush Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars

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