Born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1923, Paul Jenkins explores the intrinsic structure and radiant potential of color. The artist developed an early fascination with the Nelson Gallery’s collection of Asian art, which nurtured an enduring affinity for East Asian aesthetics. In 1948, Jenkins moved to New York City, enrolling at the Art Students League on the G.I. Bill. There, under the mentorship of Japanese-American painter Yasuo Kuniyoshi, he delved deeper into East Asian visual traditions—elements that would echo throughout his mature work. Jenkins’ early works on paper often employed Chinese or India ink, sometimes paired with watercolor. In the spirit of traditional Asian painting, his aim was not to depict the visible world, but to distill its essence.
By 1953, Jenkins had relocated to Paris, where he lived for much of the decade before eventually splitting his time between Paris and New York in the 1960s. Dissatisfied with conventional figurative modes for conveying spiritual experience, he began developing a personal visual language—transparent, luminous veils of color intended, in his words, to express “structures that are eternal and constantly manifest themselves.” By the late 1950s, Jenkins began titling most of his works with the word Phenomenon—a nod to the fleeting quality of sensory experience and memory. Though his paintings are planar, they carry a sculptural presence. Forms emerge from the behavior of liquid pigments—sleek, radiant, and continuous—drawing inspiration in part from ceramic glazing techniques which Jenkins studied in his youth.
In 1957, Jenkins encountered the avant-garde Japanese Gutai group at Galerie Stadler in Paris, and in 1964, he accepted an invitation to work with them in Osaka. His admiration for Asian art, literature, and philosophy only deepened, becoming a vital wellspring of artistic inspiration. His mature works are characterized by diaphanous waves of color at times intersected by calligraphic lines. Each painting is a unique phenomenon defined by its movement, form, hue, and emotive presence. By the 1960s, Jenkins had perfected his signature process. He began by priming canvases with a white acrylic ground to enhance luminosity, then mixed vivid colors using a dense, non-drying German acrylic blended with matte medium. Thinned with water, the paint was poured onto tilted canvases, guided with an ivory knife or brush, and allowed to flow organically. These “veil paintings” feature overlapping wings of color—merging, stretching, and reacting in slow, sensuous motion. The resulting compositions move with the unhurried grace of natural forces: tides, wings, smoke trails, foliage. They suggest shifting states of being, evoking the deeper rhythms of the world and the viewer’s own interior landscape.