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Curator Sarah Stanner in the soon to open Jack Bush exhibition at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta on Thursday, May 28, 2015.Amber Bracken/The Globe and Mail

When a retrospective of Canadian artist Jack Bush opened in Ottawa last year, The Globe and Mail's James Adams expressed a wish for the citizens from Halifax to Victoria to fly in to bask in the show's glow for even an afternoon. A version of the show opens this weekend at the Art Gallery of Alberta, in a gallery – and city – that was a hotbed for abstract art in Canada and the work of Mr. Bush.

Marsha Lederman spoke with co-curator Dr. Sarah Stanners.

For anyone not familiar with his work, who was Jack Bush? Can you give us the broad strokes?

An interesting thing about Jack Bush is that for 41 years he was a commercial artist, an illustrator mainly. He did not retire until 1968, well into his reputation as an avant-garde abstract painter. And that had largely to do with the fact that he was a family man. So he balanced these three worlds, as he once called it in his diary: his work as a commercial artist, his family life with three sons and a wife and his aspirations to be a great international painter. I've had the privilege of reading his diaries and that struggle was very apparent: the balance of it all, the anxiety that he managed because of trying to balance it all and the strong drive to be a great painter.

Can you explain his evolution as an artist?

It's a wonderful arc. Before 1960, he's really Jack Bush the artist, where he's belonging to all the artistic societies and doing what he thinks he should to be a good Canadian painter. There's a real variety of approaches to painting, and I think he's trying on different hats to see what fits. When Painters Eleven disbanded in 1960, he really started to knuckle down and tried to achieve an international reputation, and that's where we start to see his breakthrough, where he begins to paint really from his gut.

Around 1961-62, he suddenly becomes Jack Bush the painter: He's being honest with himself, and starts to do much more audacious compositions. And 1962 is when he has his first solo exhibition in New York City on Madison Avenue, and from that point on he really takes off.

I think Jack's career is emblematic of the arc in modern Canadian painting from landscape to abstraction.

He was internationally recognized for his work. How did that happen?

Jack almost exclusively painted his work in Toronto, yet he engaged and struck good, solid relationships with art dealers on the international scene, so he [had] people buying his work in New York and London, especially, and later it even branches out to L.A. The way this happened was, like so many Canadians – actors [and others in the arts] – Jack realized that he needed to concentrate on establishing a reputation outside of Canada so he would then be able to come home and have that higher level of attention. From 1964, he consciously decides to stop having solo shows in Toronto because he feels that if he becomes a very popular Toronto painter, then the world art scene will see him as provincial.

In his catalogue essay, Marc Mayer calls Bush's work 'playful, searching and mischievous.' How was it mischievous?

He's not figurative in his abstraction, but he doesn't mind suggestive things coming in. He was definitely a part of Colour Field, right? And people like to talk about Colour Field as flat planes of colour, flushing out any sense of social context or external references. Yet Jack lets little things sneak in here and there, like plant-like forms. Or a floating square that looks like a handkerchief falling down. He certainly is not an artist that follows a strict doctrine. The show is full of fun and joy. Jack was never the kind of artist who had a manifesto and then his paintings were to sort of adhere to the ideology of anything. Jack was a painter. He really liked colour and playing with colour. He didn't really fit to any particular definition, which is why you might call him mischievous.

Can you select a highlight or two for our readers to watch for?

In 1965, Jack wrote in his diary: "come up with a show that goes pow! pow! pow!" When you walk into the first room we're trying to achieve that. We want to just knock you over immediately with the power of the colour and the enormity of his work. What I think is the best thing about this exhibition – and I think this is really what Jack would want – is to just look at the paintings and to feel them. It's not that you have to figure out any sort of theory of the abstraction; there are no sort of cold, hard rules to look at a painting; the point is he wants you to feel "powed" over …

People can feel exhausted after walking through an exhibition. But over and over again, people have said to me: I felt energized. I felt uplifted. Sometimes people are afraid that a show of abstract paintings can be too difficult for the public; not so with Jack.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

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