BIOGRAPHY
The Last Lilies
Born in 1943, David Jenks grew up and studied in Massachusetts, graduating from Williams College with an Art History degree in 1965. He also attended the Yale Summer School of Music and Art and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

His childhood memories include his mother at a drafting table doing freelance commercial art at home. He started drawing at an early age, particularly inspired by the illustrations of N. C. Wyeth and Howard Pyle in books from his father's childhood.

Entering college with the idea of a career in architecture, he changed course in midstream and graduated as an aspiring fine artist. But it was not until the mid-1980s that he made a full commitment to painting. The intervening years saw various detours into the pop culture of the day and then stints as a carpenter, including four years at Hollywood film studios when his two children were born.

A year in Somerset in the Southwest of England provided a new beginning, and he started painting outdoors in 1983. Plein air painting back in California was climaxed by a year-and-a-half on the Big Sur and Mendocino coasts and his first one-man show at the Stary-Sheets Gallery in 1986. Then he and his family moved to Sedona, Arizona.

Winter Creek
While living in the Southwest, he began to spend the summers painting on the coast of Maine, where his parents had a summerhouse which he eventually turned into a gallery. Ultimately, his winters in Arizona became more devoted to painting Maine in the studio than going out into the desert. That convinced him to move back to the northern California coast, where he has wintered since 1993 and now lives year-round, deriving his greatest inspiration from the sea.

As he continues to paint the outdoors, he has also begun to devote more and more time to the study of portraiture and figure painting.

David Jenks's work has been featured in galleries across the country and in Japan. Articles about him have appeared in SOUTHWEST ART, AMERICAN ARTIST and ART OF THE WEST. Several of his images have been published, most prominently by the New York Graphic Society; and his paintings hang in a number of corporate collections including MBNA America, Fluor Corporation, and Raymond James Financial, Inc.