Paul Jenkins is an American artist whose paintings represent the inventiveness of American's post World War II Abstract Expressionist movement by employing a unique style of paint application on canvas and paper. Jenkins was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1923; he joined the US Naval Air Corps in 1944 and under the G.I. Bill, studied at the New York Art Students League where he met Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman. In 1953, he traveled to Europe and settled in Paris. His first solo exhibition was held in New York at the Martha Jackson Gallery in 1956.
During the 1950's, Jenkins achieved international fame for his enigmatic painterly abstractions. He became interested in using fluid veils of color to evoke mysterious, shifting spaces and non-representational gestures. This led him to title his paintings, "Phenomena's" often accompanied by an additional identifying phrase. Jenkins states, "I try to find the identity word that will secure an attitude towards the painting rather than provoke a visual object that the eye will seek out."
During an extended stay in the Caribbean in 1979, impasto, scraping and bold strokes of color began to appear in lieu of pouring in his work. Phenomena Cross Wind Alternate, 1980, currently for sale at the Art Cellar Exchange, is one of a few pivotal and key paintings in which Jenkins employed the scraped veils with prismatic concentration and developed this new style of working. The artist uses thick paint to reveal and break down the persistent features of the Newtonian prism. Zen Buddhism and the writings of Carl Jung have always influenced the transcendental directions of his work as is evident in many of his titles. Buddhism suggests that, "the path to enlightenment wasn’t through intellectual reasoning but through self-realization". Jenkins' paintings are a method of reaching inner peace and an unconscious state of understanding the world.
Phenomena Cross Wind Alternate elicits a sense of emotion coupled with a dynamic energy though progressive color transitions and gestural object placement. This work was completed and titled to mark a cross road in his work, a change in the direction of his style and an alternate way of expression which has placed Paul Jenkins paintings in there rightful place with the great masters of non- objective action painting.
Phenomena Cross Wind Alternate, 76 x 67 inches, 1980
Price on request
