Without time and place
The Burning Hours shows paintings depicting scenes in elaborate detail.
Kushana Bush. It is a name that has a touch of the exotic. It’s hard to place, as are her paintings – giant tapestries of a complex narrative of characters, an eclectic array of racial groupings, elaborated by embellished patterning and design using dainty miniature techniques and gilding, with a flat tampering of perspective.
My first guess was Indian maybe, a contemporary take on some of the religious paintings. But you can also see some relics of Persia, the flatness of Japanese prints, old medieval church paintings and a touch of English painter Stanley Spencer’s groupings of collections of people.
So where indeed do the paintings and the painter come from?
And the unexpected answer is Dunedin. Kushana Bush is the a generation New Zealander in a family that emigrated from England. With parents interested in art, coins and history, they decided to name their daughter after the ancient Kushan Empire, a multi-cultural region in the first to third centuries from northern India upwards to Afghanistan.
It is how the paintings are painted that gives a cooler detached atmosphere to scenes that contain, essentially, episodes of horror. Bush is a continual and patient drawer and this is the cornerstone of the works.
She assembles parts on tracing paper and when she has worked out all of the composition, this is transferred on to the paper. Sections are then filled in, using flat unshaded gouache, painting on the various areas and finally, thin lines with pencils applied on top.
The approach may sound simple, but in the intricacy of the detailing it requires unbelievably careful skill and Bush’s very able colour sense to place various colours and tones, working like a mosaic in building up the surface.
They are like an overall surface, rather than an obvious central composition, so the eye tends to wander around the picture field discovering new objects each time you do a circuit.
This is especially apparent in the newer works in the exhibition, at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, as one of its major exhibitions of the year. They are a progression from Bush’s earlier works, where the compositions were small groupings, floating in the centre of the picture frame. Now they spill right to the edges in elaborate complexity.
The scenes represented are oddities. The people themselves are even somewhat strange.
They are painted a whole variety of skin hues, but look curiously similar. They have a wooden quality, devoid of expression.
The drawing style is reminiscent of the work of Jeffrey Harris, another previous Dunedin resident, whose studies seem to build an emotional tension through this lack of expression.
In Bush’s, they seem almost robotic in their movements, as if no-one is quite at home, like worker bees. Many of them seem to be group mauling, beating a figure being led through an unruly mob. There are blindfolded scenes, cult groups where people swoon, or hold up small children above the crowd in some unclear ceremony.
In Shamsa, 2016, they adore the sun, pulling faces upright to gather its rays in what looks like a sun worshipping groupin. In Reading the Bird Entrails, 2014, they are watching a prophet pulling out bird innards to examine. In this work, as in many others, the central action appears to be on an amateur stage, as if this is occurring in some remote village.
But at the same time as including robes, simpler garments and historic items, often there is the inclusion of modern apparel – labelled running shoes and hitched up thong underpants.
Thus they span history and place, being of no certain instant and location. The chaotic disorder and the violence is bloodless, without gore.
It seems like a parody, like it is the story of a child’s morality tale, to scare, to delight in scaring, but not designed to terrify.
The Burning Hours, at the Dunedin Art Gallery, runs right through the summer.