Real with Jack (detail)

Acrylic on Raw Canvas, 48" x 60". This image, painted in early 2006, is an homage of sorts to Jack Bush, one of the Canadian Painters 11, abstract expressionists and colour field painters of the fifties and sixties. I have always greatly admired his work, and it was a thrill one day to look down from my loft and actually see this arrangement sitting on the table. I deliberately kept the painting style loose and expressive, although Mr. Bush might actually be horrified, were he still with us, to see this painting, as he did not paint in quite such a realistic style, although to me his "Lilac" paintings are undeniably images of lilacs, even if they aren't realistically reproduced on the canvas. I recently read a little essay about Bush by painter Terry Fenton (see www.sharecom.ca/fenton/bush.html) wherein Fenton states that Jack Bush liked "pretty things" to abstract, so maybe he wouldn't have minded me using these pretty things as an homage to him after all.