“To me it has always been the image of the archetype of that which is near and that which is far in the instantaneous psychic moment. Now if anyone can actually paint such a feeling, idea, or image remains possibly for history to decide. It is a presumption on my part but after all, that is one of the expanding possibilities of Abstract painting: that which makes something felt which is not explicitly seen.”

—Paul Jenkins

Paul Jenkins’ unorthodox approach to painting, the controlled manipulation of paint through pouring, dribbling, and general disregard for the paintbrush, has become the essence of his work. Jenkins, an Abstract Expressionist, relocated from his hometown in Kansas City, Missouri in the late 1940s to study at the Art Students League in New York, alongside the giants of 20^th century abstraction Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Here, Jenkins found his penchant towards cascading paint onto loose canvases and guiding the flow with his favorite ivory knife.ⁱ In fact, Jenkins’ technique, and palette, have been compared to abstractionist Helen Frankenthaler and pioneer of Color Field painting, Morris Louis, both of whose stain paintings of the 1950s and 1960s served to inspire Jenkins’ experimental pooling, rolling, and flowing application of paint.  In New York, Jenkins was heavily inspired by fellow American abstract expressionists, like his friend Pollock, but his artistic practice did not mature until he moved to Paris in 1953 where he was drawn to the Art Informel movement, a term referencing the many styles of abstract painting prevalent in the 1940s and 1950s in Europe. By 1954, Jenkins received international acclaim for his abstractions, culminating in his first solo show with the Studio Paul Facchetti in Paris and an institutional acquisition by the Whitney Museum two years later. For the rest of his career, Jenkins exhibited regularly in New York, Paris and other European cities, splitting his time between the two continents.

Phenomena symbolizes both a mirror and the subsequent reflection revealed by the looking glass. The image is a popular motif of Jenkins, as he created several related works in watercolor and acrylic from the 1960s until his death in 2012. The form of Phenomena is the outcome of the paint’s light and continuous movement down and around the paper. The paper’s surface is left visible in the negative space, in direct contrast to the vibrant and rich surrounding watercolor. The artist’s sense of color theory was influenced by eighteenth-century German Polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s study of perception. He was specifically drawn to the observation that afterimages, the visual illusion of a picture continuing to appear in the eye after the original picture has been removed, occur when the viewer turns quickly from light towards darkness. 

Phenomena’s transparent veils of overlapping color were inspired by Jenkin’s study of Eastern religion and philosophy. The artist’s personal artistic motivations became influenced by writers Carl Jung and Immanuel Kant’s theories on the human psyche and relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind. By the 1960s, Jenkins began referring to himself as an ‘abstract phenomenist’ and started exploring the sustained artistic themes of inward reflection and mysticism. Subsequently, Jenkins titled every work Phenomena, occasionally followed by words describing the psychological condition under which he constructed his paintings. For Jenkins, Phenomena symbolized the ability of abstract art to capture a feeling or moment and its transformation into a tangible object.

ⁱ Randy Kennedy, "Paul Jenkins, Painter of Abstract Artwork, Dies at 88," The New York Times, June 17, 2012, online.