Paul Jenkins
American, 1923-2012
William Paul Jenkins (known as Paul Jenkins) was born in 1923 in Kansas City, Missouri, where he was raised. He met Frank Lloyd Wright who was commissioned by the artist's great-uncle, the Rev. Burris Jenkins to rebuild his church in Kansas City, Missouri after a fire. (Wright suggested that Jenkins should think about a career in agriculture rather than art.)
In his teenage years, Jenkins moved to Struthers, Ohio to live with his mother, Nadyne Herrick, and stepfather, who both ran the local newspaper, the Hometown Journal (then the Struthers Journal). After graduating from Struthers High School, he served in the U.S. Maritime Service and entered the U.S. Naval Air Corps during World War II. In 1948, he moved to New York City where, on the G.I. Bill, he studied at the Art Students League of New York with Yasuo Kuniyoshi for four years, and with Morris Kantor. During that time, he met Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Barnett Newman. In 1953, he traveled to Europe, working for three months in Taormina in Sicily before settling in Paris, France. From 1955 on, the artist shared his time between New York and Paris. Gradually in 1960 he moved away from working in oil on canvas to acrylic. Jenkins began to paint using an ivory knife, a key tool in the creation of his work.
Sculpture, already present in the artist's life in the 1950s, comes to the forefront with a series of works in the 1970's. In the 1980's, Jenkins began to build full-scale elements of the Meditation Mandala sculpture in steel at the Shidoni Foundry in Tesuque, New Mexico; these elements are later installed in the Sculpture Garden of the Hofstra Museum. At Shidoni Foundry, he also casts a unique sculpture in bronze.
Anatomy of a Cloud, an autobiographical book of what the artist calls "word impressions" and collages, is published by Harry N. Abrams in New York in 1983 and receives the silver medal from the Art Directors Club of New York.
In 1990, invited by Abba Eban, Jenkins traveled to Israel and the following year to Japan and to Italy. In Paris, he created a series of original lithographs on stone entitled, Seven Aspects of Amadeus and the Others.
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