“A Troubled Mind” was an evocative title for Stephen Bush’s most recent exhibition. Characteristic of the artist’s practice, which spans almost five decades now, certain tropes reappeared across many of the paintings like demons that could not be exorcised. A preening cockerel, a goat looking back at the viewer over its left shoulder, a potbellied man pissing on the street, another man with several pipes dangling ostentatiously from his mouth—these forms echoed across this body of work produced, for the most part, over the past three years. Some of the motifs—for instance, the farm animals—have been haunting Bush’s practice for far longer, reflecting the artist’s childhood on a farm in rural Victoria. Also recurrent are images of small-wheeled vehicles: a trailer (seen in one of the exhibition’s outlier 1979 paintings, Lead Tin Yellow Light), a minibus, or an ice-cream truck. These, in turn, connect with another image that Bush has painted consistently over recent decades: the humble cabin, connoting Abraham Lincoln, Henry David Thoreau, and Ted Kaczynski, as well as the moral benefits or drawbacks of self-reliance. Each of Bush’s paintings is like a cabin: an autonomous space marked out, constructed, and ultimately inhabited solely by the artist—a place for the rehearsal of private obsessions.
At the back of the gallery, four large enamel-and-oil paintings on old plywood doors commanded attention; a denser hang at the front clustered small and midsize works, including several pencil drawings. Many of the works are named for places in Belgium (Eikenberg, 2021; Leberg, 2021; Kapelmuur, 2021–23; Knokteberg, 2021), evoking one of Bush’s strongest art-historical references: Northern European landscape painting of the Romantic period, with its cool, diffracted light. The paintings and works on paper explore similar themes; both channel a collage-like spatial logic. Bush’s technical skill as a draftsman is evident in his deft gradations of tone and his renderings of complex perspectival structures. But we always sense the ineluctable pull of painting as his primary medium, even when he is working outside it. In the drawing Grüngold, 2022, a man lies prostrate in the foreground while another hovers nearby smoking a pipe while holding a backup pipe in his right hand. Two cocks strut by, while a boat full of people plies its course across a lake, with a small town in the distance. The lake reflects the colors of the sky, which is not the expected slate blue but rather a polychrome abstract profusion—not unlike the viscous blobs of a lava lamp. This sky recalls Bush’s experiments with the liquidity of paint in his earlier, more luridly colored poured-enamel works. Other drawings, such as Elfenbein, 2022, evidence Bush’s use of the pencil for both line and color. Here, he nests a full spectrum of violet, yellow, green, and pink in the brown hues of the dilapidated roof of a small shed.
Using tricks, rules, and constraints, Bush treats both his subject matter and his painting processes playfully. In the 1990s, for instance, he painted a large body of work using only one color—Venetian red—thus producing a suite of eerie rust-toned monochromatic representational images. He has done similar work using emerald green and purple, too. Several of the artworks in “A Troubled Mind” are named after single colors (Dark Nasturtium Yellow, 2021; Lead Tin Yellow Light; Lichter Ocker, 2022; and Scheele’s Green, 2022, among others), despite being executed in a range of hues. Lady Campbell Weed Mauveine, 2022, and Lady Campbell Weed Speckled Jim, 2022, by contrast, are monochromatic treatments of the pipe smoker in purple. This pipe smoker—and, in fact, every man depicted in the drawings and paintings on display—is the artist himself. With this in mind, to rehearse an argument that Michael Fried famously made in relation to Courbet, each pipe or urinating penis in hand reads like a metonymic paintbrush, and each canvas an allegory of the act of painting itself. In Bush’s hands, Courbet’s self-seriousness becomes comic self-questioning, and the canvases, allegories of excess.
— Helen Hughes
