Phenomena Inside Light

Paul Jenkins made this painting without ever touching a brush to the surface. He poured thinned paint straight onto the canvas, then tilted it back and forth and steered the flowing color with an ivory knife. The blues, greens, yellows, and blazing reds you see here spread and soaked into one another the way water finds its own path. Working in the middle of the twentieth century, Jenkins belonged to the Abstract Expressionist circle, but his careful pouring gave his art a quieter, more deliberate feel than the energetic drips and splatters of many artists around him.

This piece comes from a huge group of works he simply called "Phenomena," a title he began using in the 1960s and stuck to across hundreds of paintings. Light and color fascinated him, especially the way one could shine through the other, and that curiosity shows in how the pale background makes the bright tones glow. A clean vertical strip of empty canvas runs down the center, where the paint pulls back and leaves a bare gap. That break separates the hot reds and oranges on one side from the cooler greens and blues on the other, like a threshold standing between two very different feelings.