Great Bush certainly isn’t. Good even would be stretching a point. Yet he’s pitched into the four works we’ve seen so far, released to the Dallas Morning News, with a gutsy directness, an innate feel for the way this essentially liquid medium moves around on a flat surface. And there’s a punchy sense of line and form, particularly apparent in the head of the first Scots Terrier, ‘Miss Beazley’, which is slight reminiscent of the animals in Picasso’s Bestiary.
‘Crawford Breezeway’ could pass for a latterday Hockney. Some might say that’s not such a great compliment, but there’s an admirable clarity in the way the tremulous reflection on the table is captured in a few simple marks. ‘Prairie Chapel Ranch at Dusk’ looks like a primitive Edward Hopper, to the extent we instinctively read the building as a filling station. It is in fact the ex-president’s ranch outside Waco – hardly the most inviting of places in this rendition.
Bush was apparently inspired to paint by reading Winston Churchill’s ‘Painting as a Pastime’. Beside Churchill’s proficient, but dull efforts, Bush’s have a childlike exuberance.
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