Behind the Scenes

The Paintings of
James Duck and Janet Jenkins

OPENING RECEPTION FOR THE ARTISTS: October 10, 5:00-8:00 PM. Dates and times subject to change. Please sign our guest list to receive the latest updates about this exhibition.

Los Angeles has long sustained its sculptors and painters through a singular local resource: the entertainment industry. Artists who take up work in film and television are spared the usual trade-off: making ends meet in work that has nothing to do with their discipline. Set construction, in particular, offers unexpected dividends: access to industrial-grade materials and tools rarely available to studio artists, and immersion in a repertoire of technical solutions honed under the pressures of production. These borrowed techniques do not remain confined to the soundstage. They surface, transformed, in the private studio work pursued on evenings and weekends—and occasionally become the very seed of a personal aesthetic.

James Duck – Road Trip

James Duck—Born in São Paulo, Brazil, Duck completed his studies in the United States, earning an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. After graduating, he followed friends west, ending up in Los Angeles, where he became a driving force in the downtown art-and-party scene of the era—a founding member of Party Boys, the legendary band that built the stage at Al's Bar and headlined its inaugural show.

James Duck – A Surfer’s Journey

Hollywood valued Duck for more than his skill as a painter; his facility with construction and sculptural fabrication made him equally sought after on set. Even as he met those demands, he sustained an independent practice. His current work draws on wide-ranging, often distinctly Californian interests, rendered through tools spanning dry brush and masking tape to automotive spray guns. Closeup views of the pounding surf and the intricate details of a motorcycle; the curve of an automobile fender and the billowing sail of a sloop—each painting involves discrete fragments that resolve into a single composition. Duck's paintings function less as landscapes than as an inventory of a life spent translating industrial technique into personal subject matter

Janet Jenkins—Originally from Albuquerque, NM, the early '80s found Jenkins living in Hollywood and keeping a small studio in the Women's Building in downtown Los Angeles. Part of the DTLA scene, she and her friends would catch the Party Boys playing in people's studios and at Al's Bar. She met Duck at a party during those years. At CBS Studios, Jenkins worked nights—repairing and repainting sets on the fly while filming was underway, and painting pictures used as props for "artist" characters on a soap opera—while Duck worked days in the scene shop; the two crossed paths only briefly, as they signed in and out. She earned her MFA from Otis Art Institute in 1994.

Janet Jenkins – Cab slant (RoscoluxL #56: Gypsy Lavender)

Jenkins's own painting practice takes its point of departure from the cucoloris—the device stage crews use to cast the illusion of dappled natural light onto scenery and actors—and the way that light plays across a painted set. She paints that effect, then abstracts it, repainting under successive lighting conditions and working toward the saturated hue of a lighting director's Roscolux color-gel palette. Nature passes through Hollywood's apparatus of imitation and comes out the other side not as nature, but as something else. The work asks what's left of nature once it has passed entirely through a machine built to fake it"

Janet Jenkins – Gray slant (Roscolux #02: Bastard Amber)

Duck and Jenkins are exceptional talents who have each turned the entertainment industry’s resources toward strikingly original artistic explorations. Musée du Al is proud to present two artists who emerged not from Hollywood, but through it.