Michael Bush and his ‘dark passengers’ take center stage at Sarah Gormley Gallery

Over the years, Michael Bush’s abstract paintings have taken on increased clarity, progressing from amorphous, oil slick-like blobs to nebulous-yet-recognizable faces reflective of the artist’s myriad moods and identities. Witness a recent series of a dozen small self-portraits, of sorts, currently displayed at Sarah Gormley Gallery and labeled with titles such as “Believer,” “Giving,” and “Dandy.”

“These are all different modes of me,” Bush said in early June from the downtown gallery, where his new series, “Beautiful Monsters,” will remain on display alongside works by other SGG artists through July 2, with a portion of sales benefitting Stonewall Columbus. “On the bottom right, the one called ‘Starry Eyes,’ that’s me having these grandiose ideas that never come to fruition. … I really used this process and these paintings as a stress reliever. And while I was putting these together, I’ve had breakups, I lost a job. And you can feel some of that angst in them. And you can tell where I was at mentally in some of them. … All of these, to me, really capture personal moments of struggle.”

Bush doesn’t hold back within the exhibition, wrangling with the undiagnosed ADHD and dyslexia that led to him receiving poor marks early in elementary school (“Sister Jose’s Reprieve”), along with his issues with alcohol abuse, which he confronts in a pair of striking portraits, each of which takes its title from a different line in the song “Ponderosa,” by the British trip-hop artist Tricky. In one, dubbed “Until I Wake Up Tomorrow,” a bleary, multi-faced figure appears to avoid eye contact – “The way I don’t want to look at you, and I don’t want you to look at me,” Bush said – while “Drink Till I’m Drunk” features a smeared, slightly out of focus character immediately recognizable to the artist.

“That whole twisted face and everything, when I started to pour that out, I felt myself in it, and that verse came up in my head,” said Bush, who in that moment of recognition went to the stereo and put on Maxinquaye to hear the “Beauty and the Beast” vocal pairing of Tricky and Martina Topley-Bird croon about drinking and smoking themselves into oblivion. “I’m someone who can’t go out and have a beer; I’m going to have 20. And I’m not just going to smoke one blunt; it’s going to be five in a row. There’s just always been this mindset of excess in my life.”

Other paintings on display capture happier moments, including one that transports Bush back to the Pacific Northwest and a life-altering trip he took to Portland, Oregon. Dubbed “Hike the Roosters Rock,” the piece centers on a smiling figure wearing a golden crown and positioned to the fore of blue skies, craggy mountains and sun-kissed, crystalline river waters. 

“That trip is where I went and found myself again,” said the artist, who credits the healing process kickstarted in that moment with injecting a degree of clarity into his day-to-day existence, which has in turn bled into his artwork. “I always felt like I was able to tell a story with the abstract work, but bringing these figures in was the next evolution. I’m a Bravo fan, and one of the girls on ‘Vanderpump Rules’ always refers to her ‘dark passengers,’ and these are mine. These are the shadow figures that stay behind me.”

Bush still begins the paintings in the same way he always has, pouring watered-down acrylic paints onto the canvas to create abstract blobs – a practice rooted in his love for things such as clouds, puddles, and oil slicks, which can take on countless shapes and forms dependent on the viewer. Generally, Bush said, the colors he chooses reflect his state of mind in that initial moment of creation, with the artist favoring blues and greens in times of joy or contentment and brighter reds when his mood is more melancholic. 

“A lot of people will be like, ‘Oh, these are all so bright!’ And I’ll be like, ‘Yeah, those are the ones where I was at my lowest point,’” said the artist, who described this as a balancing act, of sorts, with his embrace of brighter colors aimed at pulling him from this morass. 

This is where Bush’s current process splits off from his past approach, with the artist using magic eraser and paint to chip away at this blob, gradually giving shape and definition to a character already existent somewhere within the spill. 

“It’s the pareidolia effect, like when you see a face in a cloud, or Jesus in a burnt piece of toast,” Bush said. “Finding the face, finding the composition, that all happens by chance based on the paint. And from there it’s like sculpting, where I have this big mess and now I have to carve it into something else. … So, in a lot of ways it’s still the same process. But I’ve learned how to tell the story I want to tell a little bit better, and how to push everything along just a little bit further.”