And he has also been getting tips from Dunedin School of Art painting lecturer Clive Humphreys.
The actor plays Russian-American abstract expressionist Mark Rothko, so Bach and co-star Cameron Douglas have had lessons on how to paint 3m by 2.5m canvases, and look authentic doing so.
"The most important thing for them to learn is energy and control. They need some understanding of what the paint's doing," Humphreys says.
"I've also shown them things like how you have to walk backwards and forwards from the painting and look at it in different light. They've been really enthusiastic."
Bach says it will be his first exhibition as an actor.
"I've never painted before. It's intense and it's very complicated. It would be one of the hardest things I've done on a stage. He [Rothko] was very hard on himself and on everybody else."
Coincidentally, Bach and Auckland actor Cameron Douglas only recently finished painting their respective homes.
"It's not too different to house-painting, really; you just slap it on," Douglas says, teasing Humphreys.
Fortune artistic director Lara Macgregor says Bach, whose film credits include Goodbye Pork Pie, Utu and The Lord of The Rings, will bring the tragic artist alive.
"John Bach was always the actor I had in mind to elicit the raw and provocative spirit of Mark Rothko," she says.
