Phenomena Inside Light
By Paul Jenkins
Color flows like water across this canvas, and that is exactly how Paul Jenkins worked. He poured thinned paint directly onto the surface, then tilted and guided it with an ivory knife instead of a brush. The result is these soft rivers of blue, green, yellow, and fiery red that seem to bleed into one another. Jenkins, an American artist active in the mid-twentieth century, was part of the Abstract Expressionist movement, though his pouring method gave his work a calmer, more controlled feeling than the wild splashes of some of his peers.
The title here, "Phenomena Inside Light," is part of a long series Jenkins called "Phenomena," a name he attached to hundreds of his paintings starting in the 1960s. He was fascinated by how light moves through color, and you can sense that interest in the way the white space lets the bright hues glow. Notice the empty bar of canvas running down the middle, where the paint stops short and leaves a clean vertical gap. It splits the warm reds and oranges on one side from the cooler greens and blues on the other, almost like a doorway between two moods.