Paul Jenkins American, 1923-2012

In Phenomena Crow Wing Back, Paul Jenkins orchestrates a symphony of translucent color veils that ascend in overlapping formations—vivid blue, pink, green, yellow, violet, and red forms dance over the canvas in sweeping motion–at once abstract and deeply evocative of the natural and spiritual worlds. These diaphanous layers, as the title intimates, hover between the visible and the sensed, the physical and the metaphysical. Emerging from an early discontent with figuration’s limits in expressing spiritual reality, Jenkins evolved a visual language defined by transparency and movement. Influenced by a wide constellation of philosophies, including Zen Buddhism and Jungian psychology, his works seek to render what he described as “structures that are eternal and constantly manifest themselves.” By the 1960s, Jenkins had refined a singular method: beginning with a primed white acrylic ground to imbue his canvases with inner luminosity, he layered his compositions with thinned, viscous acrylics. These paints—combined with matte medium and water—are poured onto tilted canvases. Jenkins guides the flow with a brush or ivory knife, entering into a dialogue with his materials. In this disciplined process, the canvas becomes a site of emergence, where color and light coalesce in continual transformation. Because Jenkins’ process is intuitive and responsive, the artist claims he is a medium responding to inner guidance. As the title suggests, his Phenomena series captures the momentary fleeting sensations of subjective experience. Across mediums, Paul Jenkins sought to explore the ideas of motion and temporality. Commonly titled 'Phenomena', Jenkin's works consist of a "meditative process, pouring delicately intense colours of paint, creating layers which have a translucency both in his oil paintings, acrylics and watercolours. By using an ivory knife, he controlled the direction of the paint."