Etude Peking I

Etude Peking I is a watercolour on handmade paper by the American painter Paul Jenkins (1923–2012), signed, dated 1988 and titled by the artist. The long horizontal sheet, with its torn, deckled edges, carries a sequence of saturated colours that bleed into one another: black and red at the left, a broad passage of cerulean and ultramarine at the centre, then green, yellow and a final band of violet. Jenkins was a leading figure of the second generation of Abstract Expressionists. He developed a technique of controlled pouring, letting the pigment flow across the surface and guiding its movement by tilting and manipulating the support, so that colour forms translucent veils rather than brushstrokes. From 1960 he titled almost all his works Phenomena, a reference to his interest in Eastern philosophy, the I Ching and the writings of Carl Jung. The Peking titles belong to the late 1980s, when the theme also appears in his large canvases, such as Phenomena Entrance to Peking of 1989. This study shows the same luminous, fluid colour on an intimate scale, presented in a black shadow-box frame that lets the irregular edges of the paper float.