Sold for: $511,250

PROVENANCE
André Emmerich Gallery, Zurich, March 1973
Downstairs Gallery, Edmonton
Rothmans, Benson & Hedges Inc.
Private Collection, Vancouver

LITERATURE
John Mclean, "Jack Bush: Recent Paintings," Studio International, vol. 188, no. 968, July – August 1974, pages 27 – 29, reproduced page 29

EXHIBITED
André Emmerich Gallery, Zurich, Switzerland, Jack Bush: Neue Bilder, March 30 - April 27, 1974

Jack Bush enjoyed cottage life, and most summers, the Bush family rented a lakeside cottage in Ontario. In the 1940s, they stayed near the town of Tiny on Thunder Beach. Through the 1950s, the Bush family cottaged at Lake of Bays in Muskoka. These are just a couple of examples of Bush’s vacation spots that he usually traveled to in the month of July, during which he enjoyed painting his surroundings at leisure. Summer Lake, however, was painted between January and February 1973, no doubt based on a desire to get away from the worst months of winter in Toronto, even if only on canvas.

As early as 1952, Bush began to experiment with abstracting lakeside subjects. At first, with paintings such as Summer Day (1952), islands and trees were reduced to flat, geometric shapes in bright colours, but their position in the composition remained logical, including a green triangular shape amid blue below for water and blue above for sky. Soon after, landforms and water bodies became more wholly abstract, merging foreground with background, often creating an irregular patchwork of colour, as seen in paintings such as Hazel—Crooked Lake (1954). By the 1970s, when Bush painted Summer Lake (1973), his compositions were so completely abstract that the title of the painting stands as the only remaining reference to the subject.

In his Wolseley Street studio, Bush often had more than one painting on the go. When executing Summer Lake, the artist prepped a second piece of canvas, upon which he made a painting he called Wet Sand. He worked on these two paintings simultaneously, primarily guided by his focus on colour and ground effects—but nature’s mastery of colour was never far from Bush’s mind and eye. Like the surface of water, or the surface of a beach, it was nature that inspired Bush’s first mottled-ground paintings in 1969. On a trip through Ireland, Bush was impressed by the field markers he saw along the roadsides. Thinking of these stark symbols painted on large stones, Bush returned to his studio in Toronto intent on replicating rock surfaces. In October 1969, Bush executed Irish Rock #1 and Irish Rock #2 using a roller and unmixed paint, not unlike his method for making Summer Lake. With the Irish Rock paintings, however, Bush aimed to represent what he saw when creating the grounds. Summer Lake, on the other hand, leaves the representation of nature behind in favour of representing the challenges of abstraction.

Like no other modernist painter, especially amongst his Colour Field peers, Bush flirted with texture and depth while his works remained utterly flat. Like a still lake on a summer day, it is the surface tension that invites us to dive in.

We thank Dr. Sarah Stanners, director of the Jack Bush Catalogue Raisonné, contributor to the Bush retrospective originating at the National Gallery of Canada in 2014, and assistant professor at the University of Toronto, Department of Art History, for contributing the above essay.

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

Artist markings on the reverse indicate that the artwork can be displayed vertically or horizontally. Summer Lake was presented vertically at the 1974 exhibition in Zurich.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars