Bas Continuo # 1

Bas Continuo was painted in 1976 as part of a series where Bush
explored sound represented by both colour and form. The title is a
musical reference given to two instruments, Bass and Harpsichord,
played in accompaniment where one of the instruments incorporates
improvisation within the harmonic structure. The painting captures the
essence of this idea explored through the use of colour. The deeper
tones represent the bass while the lighter colours represent
harpsichord. Improvisation occurs through the process of painting as
shown by the artist’s fluid and expressive brushwork.

Recalling Jack Bush‘s ‘musical’ work from this period, Ken Carpenter writes:

“Among Bush‘s most abstract, most moving, and perhaps even most
personal works are his ‘musical’ paintings. My own experience with
them has been both unexpected and touching. In 1976 I drove with my
wife from Toronto to Montreal for Bush‘s one-man exhibition at the
Waddington Galleries. The show was a highly successful one in terms of
both sales and artistic quality, yet as I spent more time with it, I
found myself increasingly uneasy as I contemplated the work. It was
only after my wife questioned my reaction that I understood it.
Somehow the work was telling me that Bush had but a short while to
live. Just a few months later he was indeed gone. What was I
responding to? Perhaps the answer lies in Wilhelm Dilthey’s concept of
Nach-Erleben. His idea is that we can intuitively reconstruct the
emotional state of other people from their behaviour and expression.
We relive their mental and emotional state by a process of unconscious
identification.

But what specifically in the ‘musical’ paintings might indicate that
they are among the artist’s last works? One indication is the repose,
and an elegiac quality, that had not been present in Bush before. In
the “musical’ paintings the elements have an intensified freedom and
float, like something drifting away. In a few of them, such as Basie
Blues, the colour strokes seem to have come gently to rest at the
bottom of the canvas, and this brings to mind certain later Courbets
in which boats have settled on the shore after a storm, such as The
Wave 1870, The Louvre. In all of them there is a kind of gentle
dissolution, a suffusion of the basic forms by the rhythms of the
whole, that is reminiscent of Titian at the end – and the height – of
his career.”