Sold for: $38,025

PROVENANCE
Woltjen/Udell Gallery, Edmonton
By descent a the present Private Collection, Edmonton
Sold sale of Canadian Post-War & Contemporary Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, May 15, 2013, lot 6

LITERATURE
Roald Nasgaard, Abstract Painting in Canada, 2007, The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, page 123

Charles Millard relates that, by 1970, Jack Bush had “discovered that if the thinly rolled paint of the grounds contained a certain amount of unassimilated pigment, the result was a pleasing modulation that produced a yielding, although not atmospheric, foil for the flat shapes on top of them.” The blue ground in this work varies nicely in its saturation, containing hints of the deeper pigment from which this pleasant, rather oceanic blue comes, and areas of delicate greenish translucency at its edges. Created as the basis for a serigraph in 1974, Pink Moon shares elements with lot 5, Cross Over, in the diagonal slashing form, the sponged-on ground of layered colour and the joyous, vivid sense of life that it contains. The moon motif reminds us of the hook motif, a recurrent form in Bush’s mid-1970s works. Like Cross Over, Pink Moon is signed on verso, which allows the image complete freedom from any referential text, allowing further breathing room into this already light and open work.

This work will be included in Sarah Stanners’s forthcoming Jack Bush Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars