PROVENANCE
Collection of the Artist
Waddington Galleries, London, United Kingdom
Collection of Alan Foster
Private Collection, British Columbia

LITERATURE
Marc Mayer and Sarah Stanners, Jack Bush, National Gallery of Canada, 2014, reproduced page 82

In the spring of 1969, Jack Bush was diagnosed with a heart condition that would leave him with stabbing chest pains and an irregular heartbeat. Bush used the crisis as inspiration, and translated his chest pains (and his emotional reaction to them) into abstract imagery in a series of gouaches that same year. Rather than choose to dwell on the negative aspects of his experience, Bush paints the incident with bright, fluid colours. Four darts or boomerangs - representing throbs or beats - are fired like bullets across the surface into highly saturated central columns. The darts themselves are pastel coloured and thinly painted, biting into the darker thickness of the columns in an arrhythmic rattle. The overall effect is unexpected: the colours ping off each other in an emotive flurry of movement, blurring the line between non-representational Colour Field abstraction and an embodied, personal experience.

The Spasm paintings were produced in a transitional period in Bush’s career, straddling the divide between his earlier, all-over colour fields and stacked columns and his later works that prioritized dynamism, scale, rhythm and good humour. Indeed, many of the works he would go on to produce in the 1970s would continue to explore this enthusiastic overlay of abstraction and sensory representation, frequently referring to music or movement in their titles and evoking levity and animation in their execution.

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

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