Paul Jenkins (1923 – 2012, USA) was an American painter associated with Abstract Expressionism. Jenkins moved to New York in 1948 and attended the Art Students League, where he met Mark Rothko, Jean Dubuffet, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning, and was inspired by the “cataclysmic challenge of Pollock and the total metaphysical consumption of Mark Tobey”.

Jenkins’ paintings have come to represent the spirit, vitality, and invention of post-World War II American abstraction. Employing an unorthodox approach to paint application, he used the process of controlled paint-pouring and canvas manipulation, as with the gem-like veils of transparent and translucent colours, which are characteristics of his work since the late 1950s. Jenkins’s innovative practice was characterised by his choice to avoid the paintbrush altogether, instead allowing pigment to pool, bloom, or roll across the surface of his canvases, guiding the paint with a knife to create fluid fields of colour. The artist’s intuitive, chance-based painting techniques helped pioneer new approaches to Abstract Expressionism.

Jenkins worked at a ceramics factory in his youth, an experience that heavily influenced his tactile methods of painting. He studied with Yasuo Kuniyoshi at the Kansas City Art Institute and the Art Students League in New York. In addition, from the 1960s on, all his paintings’ titles began with the word Phenomena. Jenkins travelled throughout Europe, including Sicily, Spain, and France, which became a second home to the artist throughout his life.