According to David Jenks, beauty is something we all recognize when we encounter it. It is what he seeks to capture in his paintings of the land and sea; and for him, it usually has something to do with light.

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When David goes out into the hills or along the coast in search of his subjects, the first thing he looks for is a pleasing color scheme or light effect - just like a moth, he says.

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But that effect has to present a composition—a way of organizing the color scheme or light in an interesting way. For instance, he says of his well known ocean/sky paintings, “It’s clouds that make a sunset. Otherwise you just have the sun going down over the water in a clear sky—and that’s boring.” The process is an intuitive one. David says that intuition is that direct inner response to experience we all have which doesn’t take the detour through the mental filter of reason, logic, or self-interest. “It’s the path to the truth and beauty which lies beyond the merely rational or mechanical—that which inspires us.”

His mission statement adds that he “wants to convey the feeling of being there.” Well, that would suggest a realistic style, but for David it’s not that simple. He particularly admires the turn-of-the-century artists Claude Monet, John Singer Sargent, Joaquin Sorolla, and many of the American Impressionists, because “they painted the light”. And so he arrived on the Mendocino coast in 1993 as a dedicated plein air oil painter.

He used the impressionist method, popularized by Monet, of returning to the same spot at the same time of day to paint the light of the hour until he had enough information to finish the painting in the studio. That approach served him well at his former home in Sedona, Arizona and in his native New England. Over time, however, the beauty of the ever-changing atmosphere of the northern California coast has attracted him to the more transitory effects of light and sea and sky. He still paints along the cliffs and in the hills, but his method now depends more on small, quick color studies which he uses, along with photography, to create studio versions of the dramatic moments he experiences outdoors, particularly early or late in the day when the sun is low in the sky.

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“However, out in the landscape or in front of a model, the details of local color and form absorb me, and I lean in the direction of a realist style - the attempt to paint exactly what I see.” So he describes his style as “weaving a course between realism and impressionism”, but he always seeks to “convey the feeling of being there”.

To paint the effects of light, David uses a full palette of colors, but he always finds himself coming up against the limitations of paint. Pigments, which are reflective, cannot easily convey the brightness or translucence of light in nature. The red or orange of a sunset, for instance, is composed of light coming through the atmosphere, like light coming through film onto a movie screen or a colored gel in front of a theatrical light. But the corresponding hues on the artist’s palette are darker and opaque. So the painter has to manipulate the colors around the glow in his composition to fool the eye and heighten the effect.

His compositions tend to be more horizontal than the traditional “standard” sizes of paintings. Otherwise, to his eye, there would be too much foreground or too much sky. But that’s one of the things that makes his work particularly suited to the VisionArt Decor Gallerie. Interestingly enough, the typical height-to-width ration of his canvases is fairly close to the proportions of the Golden Mean originally derived by classical Greek mathematicians.

A collector recently explained why she bought and hung David’s work. “It’s peaceful and decorative. I like that combination. It’s nice to live with.” The “decorative” aspect derives from the color and composition which first attracts the painter when scouting his subjects outdoors. But the peace, he asserts, is the result of a spiritual dimension which is invoked in the process.

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David believes that the ability of a work of art to uplift us is its greatest attribute. If it can inspire and take someone to another level beyond the physical or the visual, then it’s accomplished something which transcends the mere physical or human act of its creation. One of the reasons he paints the sun going down over the sea is because that experience uplifts him when he stands at the water’s edge. “And I’m never alone, there. One can always find a number of people out on the headlands at Mendocino watching the sunset. So if I can translate the transcendence I experience into paint on canvas, it might also transport the person who’s looking at it into that other realm—the realm of pure beauty and light.”

That collector is not alone. Art of the West magazine has selected David’s work as part of a major article on ten California landscape painters in the upcoming May/June issue. The name of the article is “For the Love of the Land”; and that love shines through David Jenks’s work.

More of David's work can be seen at his website www.djenks.com . Commissions are welcome. He can be reached at 707-937-2748.