I'm Kenney Mencher. I'm an artist who left a tenured professorship in 2016 to pursue making art full time. This blog is about art, art history, with a emphasis on human rights. I make homoerotic art featuring bears, otters & other gay wildlife.
I have a whole collection of paintings of sleeping people on the subway in my imagination. I’ve been piecing together images of subway interiors and people sleeping, making sketches and more finished drawings as I work out the ideas. This is one of my earliest attempts at bringing the subject into a somewhat finished drawing. I suppose it’s one part a study and several parts a finished work.
The two men sit close together, their heads resting against one another. Their tilted heads and sloping shoulders contrast with the upright poles and rectangular windows of the subway car. Dark jackets, pale shirt collars and the folds of their clothing give the bodies weight. The white marks pick out the faces and hands, while the darker passages connect the figures to the surrounding interior.
At 9 × 12 inches, this is a small drawing that establishes some of the poses I want to explore. I rather like this interior as a backdrop and plan to reuse it in several paintings and drawings. I’ve also envisioned versions with different ages, races, same-sex and heterosexual couples in the same clothes and sleeping poses. These are ideas I’m still developing through the drawings.
I’m using one of my favorite techniques because it comes so close to painting. I tone Rives BFK paper with a wash, then draw back over it with black and white crayons. The wash supplies a middle tone. I can work darker or lighter from that starting point, building the forms while allowing the paper’s texture to show through.
The relationship between those tones reminds me of what my printmaking teachers called a “chiaroscuro woodcut.” This is a drawing, not a woodcut or a print, but it shares that interplay of light, dark and a middle tone. It’s also a nod to the Baroque tradition of heightening a drawing with white over black or brown on paper.
Part of this process is figuring out which marks and textures I might carry into a painting. A broad patch of shadow, a sharp contour or a quick white stroke can do quite different things. This drawing gives me a chance to work those things out while also making something I enjoy as a finished work.
This is a handmade, original work of art NOT A PRINT and NOT AI GENERATED FREE SHIPPING Shipping takes 3–4 Weeks This ships from San Carlos, California (The San Francisco Bay Area). I use UPS and sometimes US Post.
This drawing describes a familiar experience I’ve had throughout my life, and I suspect plenty of other people will recognize it too. A cup of coffee, a book, a place by the window and some time to look around.
The other day, I realized how closely it captured something that happened after I made it. I rode my bike downtown near where I live to meet an old friend for coffee and breakfast. We’re both old, and we’re old friends, which is important to the story. He forgot.
I had arrived and ordered my mocha and breakfast twenty minutes before we were supposed to meet. Believe me, the barista and cook weren’t in a hurry. It took almost half an hour to get everything, but that didn’t bother me. Neither did my friend spacing out on our date. I texted him, we rescheduled for later, and I enjoyed people watching, reading the book I’d brought, my strong coffee and a yummy breakfast.
I had already drawn this scene, but there I was living a version of it again. The morning had changed a little, and there was still plenty to enjoy.
Coffee is so much a part of my life, and the lives of many other people, that there are songs and even conspiracy theories about it. Bach wrote the “Coffee Cantata,” in which a young woman sings about her love of the drink. A cup of coffee can be an ordinary daily pleasure and also something that sends my thoughts in all sorts of directions.
Recently, I came across a social-media video proposing that coffee and sugar were part of a kind of capitalist conspiracy. The idea was that global trade supplied the stimulants and energy that allowed workers to keep doing the bidding of their capitalist masters. Well, I don’t know how much of that theory holds up. But it’s an interesting thing to have rattling around in your head while you’re enjoying your coffee.
The different perspectives in this drawing have something to do with that. There’s the world inside the coffee house, the street outside, and whatever is going on inside my mind. Even the linear perspective becomes part of that idea. The window frames, sill and tabletop organize the space, but my attention can move between the book, the cup, the room and the view outside. These are different worlds that my mind, my coffee and I inhabit at the same time.
The drawing also captured a small experience before it happened again. The other day, I rode my bike downtown to meet an old friend for coffee and breakfast. We’re both old, and we’re old friends. He forgot. I had ordered early, and the barista and cook took their time, but neither the wait nor my friend spacing out bothered me. I texted him, we rescheduled for later, and I enjoyed people watching, my book, strong coffee and a yummy breakfast. I’ve had versions of this experience throughout my life.
Formally, I like the contrast between the firm structure of the window and the quick marks describing the figure, cars and buildings. The crayon’s grainy shading leaves the warm paper showing through. I also like to pretend that my sketches share something with Rembrandt’s: quick calligraphic lines and gestural blocks of shading that suggest a great deal without spelling everything out. A few marks can give a body weight, establish a room or open a view onto the street. That economy and liveliness are things I admire and keep trying to bring into my own drawings.
"Bear Back" feels more traditionally "Mencher." I have one foot in my own artistic past here, making pictures for and about older queer men, especially those who don’t fit the trim, athletic, twenty-to-thirty-year-old ideal. I’ve spent years painting bodies that often get left out of that picture. There’s beauty, physical presence, and a sense of recognition in them. I think many of my older friends and collectors will find something familiar in this work.
I’ve made a number of drawings and a couple of other oil sketches of this subject, which I plan to release later. This is a more developed, fairly polished version. The broad back fills most of the canvas, and the arm resting across the chair gives the body weight. Warm pinks and browns sit against the cooler gray-blue background. The direction of the brushstrokes helps describe the shoulders, the spine, and the turn through the hips.
Even in a more finished painting, I want some evidence of how it was made to remain visible. If you look closely, you can see traces of the crayon drawing and patches of the imprimatura, the initial layer of color that forms part of the underpainting. Thin passages allow the canvas texture and earlier marks to show through. Other areas have more substantial, opaque paint. I find the beginnings of a painting quite beautiful, and I’m increasingly interested in keeping some of those beginnings within the finished work.
My training is academic and classical. I’m trying to manipulate that training so the different levels of craft remain visible. The drawing establishes the structure, the underpainting begins to give it form, and the later layers develop the color and the flesh. Some of those stages remain exposed alongside more resolved passages. I want the viewer to get a sense of the decisions and physical work involved in making the image.
This painting is also part of "Self Directed." The character is a kind of allegorical portrait of who I feel I am and who my friends are. That connection goes beyond a literal likeness. It has to do with aging, our sense of ourselves, and recognizing value and beauty in bodies that don’t necessarily fit the prevailing ideal. The more personal direction of my recent work still includes affection for the people and subjects I’ve been painting for years.
"Afternoon Art History Lecture, Ohlone College, Fremont, California" 22 × 30 inches, crayon on toned Rives BFK paper
I left a tenured teaching position in 2016. Leaving gave me a freedom I needed, but it also meant losing some important parts of my life. I still teach part time and offer art history courses online through Udemy. I’m still a professor. That identity didn’t disappear when I left the job. This drawing has a lot to do with living between the person I was and the person I’m becoming.
I’m presently reading Christopher Isherwood’s novel "A Single Man." While it didn’t inspire this drawing, which I am also developing into a painting, parts of the novel reflect feelings and behaviors I recognize from my own life as a college professor. Isherwood captures a particular ambivalence. There’s the desire to change the world and the almost compulsive need to share an insight because you think it might matter to someone. There’s also the resistance of students, the resistance of other academics, and the absurdity of academic life in general. I’ve often felt like two people at once, an automaton performing the familiar routines of teaching and a sincerely caring person who still believes the ideas are worth sharing.
In the drawing, I’m leaning forward over a table and an open book. We look past the students toward the professor and the projected image behind him. The Medici tomb figure is part of the lesson, but it also carries something personal. It references the death of one part of my life and the birth of another. Leaving academia meant liberating myself from some of its demands while also giving up things I valued. I’m still working out what I’ve left behind and what remains part of me.
The figure on the screen also connects to my five-month trip through Europe. I finally saw, in person, works I had spent years admiring and teaching through reproductions. I knew their images long before I stood in front of the actual objects. That experience made me think about the difference between familiarity with an image and being physically present with something. It also made me reconsider what I wanted from my own work.
I think of the classroom as a liminal space. It’s a place where we move between what we know and what we might come to understand. The tomb is another kind of threshold, and these associations bring me back to Plato’s "Republic," particularly the "Allegory of the Cave." I’m thinking about those ideas through their renewed importance in the Italian Renaissance, through the Medici tombs, and through a classroom where we sit looking at projected images. Teaching, travel, and making art all become ways of examining the relationship between representations and experience.
The style of the drawing deliberately carries some of my academic training with it. Working with dark and light marks on toned paper refers to the traditional use of black and white chalk. Here, I’m using a mixture of crayons chosen for permanence on Rives BFK paper. The tone of the sheet provides a middle value. Dark marks build the shadows, while white brings forward the shirt, the tabletop, and the illuminated screen. The overlapping lines and varied textures leave the work of drawing visible.
These questions belong within "Self Directed." Aging is a universal process, and coming to terms with change increasingly shapes my iconography, the people, objects, and spaces I choose to depict. In this drawing, the professor, the students, the book, and the tomb figure bring different parts of my life into the same room. I’m trying to understand how those parts continue to coexist as I decide what to do next.
David Park's paintings at the Anderson Collection at Stanford University. I took some close ups to remind myself later of the layering and almost glaze like qualities of his paintings. The paint is so thick that you can see that he would let stuff dry between sections and the next colors lay on top of the earlier layers he let dry. In the big multiple figure painting, he took a page out of Franz Kline and painted the background in around the figures and his earlier layers, kind of a stratum, are the figures themselves. Beautiful stuff. I want to remind myself to try that.
Wednesday
There's a funny paradox happening for me right now. I think I'm starting to make some of the best and most meaningful paintings I've ever made. They're autobiographical, quieter, and frankly not very sexy.
When I post them, some of my collectors and friends totally get what I'm doing, which makes me really happy. But in general they get fewer of the dopamine likes and comments than some of my more meretricious nudes. Pretty much exactly what I predicted would happen.
The weird thing is, I don't really care. I'm so happy making these paintings. I think I'm finally getting somewhere I really want to go.
Abstract Expressionism was an American art movement that started
around the mid-20th century. One of the well-known artists from that period,
Jackson Pollock, studied under Thomas Hart Benton. Benton was a painter known
for using traditional materials like oil and tempera on canvas, a method
going back to the Renaissance. Artists back then would often begin with an
underpainting in tempera—a water-based paint made from mineral pigments
mixed with egg yolk or egg white—then apply oil paint over it in thin layers.
Benton used that same approach. His style of drawing in
these works looked similar to commercial illustration from the 1930s. The
figures and the landscape were stylized, with exaggerated features, similar in
some ways to Van Gogh’s swirling skies in Starry Night. Benton’s figures
sometimes had clunky anatomy and oversized hands or feet, making the
storytelling very clear. One painting shows a woman with an emotional
expression and a man standing over her holding a knife. In the bottom right,
there’s a group of people playing instruments—two playing harmonicas and
another with a fiddle—drinking moonshine from coffee cups. The landscape links
all the figures together through a kind of wave pattern running across the
canvas.
The painting is based on an old folk song called The
Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley. It tells a dramatic
story, like a rural tragedy. This kind of music, which later influenced artists
like Bob Dylan, was part of a bigger cultural pattern in the U.S., where
stories were passed down through songs. Benton used that tradition as the subject
of his painting, showing how these stories were a part of everyday American
life and especially rooted in rural culture.
Benton saw himself as a kind of traditionalist. He admired
Renaissance art but wanted to create something that focused on American life
and ideas. Before World War II, during the Great
Depression, the U.S. government funded programs to help people find
work. One of these was the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which also gave
jobs to artists. Benton gained recognition by painting murals for public
buildings like post offices and town halls. His themes often lined up with what
the government wanted—scenes of American life and labor that showed patriotic
values.
He also spent time teaching in New York, including at the
Art Students League in Manhattan. Even though he sometimes lived in the city,
he had a strong preference for rural American life. He was skeptical of New
York’s art scene and felt more connected to the American Midwest. But by the
end of World War II, things started shifting in the art world, and Pollock—his
former student—would eventually take a different direction entirely.
One of the students Thomas Hart Benton taught was Jackson Pollock.
Pollock’s early life had a lot of mixed stories—some he told himself in
interviews. He talked about working out West on oil rigs and presenting himself
as this rugged, tough guy. When he moved to New York, he ended up in Benton’s
class. Pollock had mental health struggles and was likely dealing with
alcoholism.
At first, he tried to follow Benton’s lead and copy his
style. But Benton’s method required strong drawing skills, which Pollock didn’t
really have. He struggled with representing figures accurately and was impatient.
He was more focused on emotional expression than detailed technique. While
Benton painted with a focus on national themes and American ideals, Pollock
wanted to express personal emotion.
In some of his early work, you can still see Pollock using
similar shapes and curves that Benton used—like swooping skies and exaggerated
landscapes—but with even more distortion. His figures were less anatomically
accurate, and objects like wagon wheels were drawn in unusual or irregular
ways. He even borrowed the moon-over-hills motif that Benton used, but his
version was much looser.
Eventually, Pollock connected with a group of avant-garde
artists in New York who were experimenting with new ideas about art. Some of
these ideas were influenced by early 20th-century psychology, especially the
theories of Carl Jung. Jung introduced concepts like the collective
unconscious and archetypes, suggesting that people share a set of
basic symbolic images and forms. There was also interest in gestalt,
which in this context was tied to the idea that people could tap into deep
mental processes through spontaneous drawing or writing—called automatic
writing.
Pollock applied this idea to painting. Instead of sketching
out a plan, he would paint in a free and continuous way, reacting to what was
happening on the canvas. This was similar to automatic writing exercises where
you write without stopping for a few minutes without editing or thinking. His
painting became more like large-scale doodling, but done thoughtfully and over
time. He would build up layers and react to earlier marks as he went
along. The looping shapes, broken forms, and zig-zag lines show traces of his
early training, but now applied in a different way.
Pollock also got involved with other artists, including Lee
Krasner, who later became his partner. They were part of a group trying to
invent a new way of making art, moving away from past traditions. Many modern
art movements in the late 1800s and 1900s focused on creating something new and
reacting to what was happening in society around them.
In America, around and after World War II, there was a shift
in how artists expressed themselves. Some, worried about being seen as
political or accused of communist sympathies, stopped making work that
showed clear messages about social issues. Art historian Griselda Pollock has
written about how artists turned inward, focusing more on the mind and emotions
instead of public or political themes.
Benton's paintings often showed working-class people and
scenes of labor, which some could interpret as having socialist or left-leaning
ideas. Because of this, his style became less popular in postwar New York, and
he eventually moved back to the Midwest. His career didn’t disappear, and he
was financially stable in part because his wife managed their money, but his
style was no longer the focus of the American art world.
Pollock, on the other hand, went in the direction of
personal symbolism and unconscious imagery. In paintings like Moon Woman,
some people have suggested that the shapes represent ideas about gender or
reproduction—things like cells, sperm, and eggs. Others have pointed out that
his work sometimes echoes patterns found in Native American art, like those on
blankets or in sand painting. These influences aren’t exact or
structured, though. He didn’t adopt a clear
system of geometric shapes the way some Native American art does,
like using squares for bodies or circles for heads. Instead, he painted more
freely and with changing forms, reflecting what was on his mind at the time.
In one of his paintings called Male and Female,
there's a cluster of symbols and objects, including what looks like a math
equation in the margin and a bunch of diamond shapes. Some researchers have
connected his style to Native American visual traditions, not in a direct or
literal way, but more in how both forms might involve spontaneous creation and
symbolic meaning. Next, we’ll look more closely at Native American sand
painting and how it connects to patterns found in blankets, as a way to
understand this connection better.
Francis Bacon was a British painter whose work often blends
references to art history with deeply personal and disturbing imagery. He was
known for creating paintings that felt like psychological snapshots—intense,
distorted, and emotionally raw. Although he exhibited with artists associated
with Surrealism, some within the movement didn’t think his work fully
fit the label. Still, Bacon shared a lot of their concerns—like exploring the
unconscious mind and using unexpected combinations to produce strong emotional
reactions.
He was familiar with classic European art and had studied
design before focusing on painting. One of his most famous series involves
reimagining Pope Innocent X, a 17th-century painting by the Spanish
artist Diego Velázquez. In Bacon’s version, the Pope sits in the same kind of
throne, but his mouth is open in a silent scream. The face is blurred and
distorted, and the figure is often shown behind a kind of curtain or cage-like
frame. These paintings don’t copy Velázquez’s technique or color exactly—they
twist it into something else entirely.
Part of the visual reference also comes from The Scream
by Edvard Munch, especially in the open mouth and the suggestion of anxiety or
pain. Bacon was interested in how the mouth could express raw emotion, and he
sometimes looked at old medical or dental books to study this. Some of the
mouths in his paintings were based on illustrations where tools were used to
hold the jaw open—images that were both clinical and unsettling.
In some versions of the Pope paintings, Bacon added hanging sides of
beef in the background. That detail echoes the slaughtered ox carcass in a
painting by Rembrandt, and it brings in a sense of physical decay. Bacon
painted directly onto unprimed canvas, which means the oil paint soaked into
the fabric. It gave his work a kind of rough texture but also made it
unstable over time. Many of his paintings have deteriorated because
the surfaces weren’t sealed properly. That technique matched the emotional
content—raw, exposed, and not meant to last.
Bacon once said that he wasn’t painting dreams; he was
painting reality. But his version of reality includes the things most people
try to avoid—fear, pain, violence, and loss. His works are filled with cognitive
dissonance, especially when he places religious authority figures like
popes in vulnerable or grotesque poses. The screaming pope is not just about
religion or power—it can also be read in light of Bacon’s life as a gay man in
mid-20th-century Britain, where homosexuality was still criminalized. The
trapped, distorted figure may reflect feelings of repression and social
pressure.
His paintings aren’t abstract, but they’re also not exactly
realistic. They sit in between—rooted in human anatomy and classical forms, but
twisted by emotion and personal experience. That uneasy mixture of recognizable
images and psychological intensity is what makes his work feel so strange and
unforgettable. Some viewers might call it dreamlike, but others see it more as
a visual form of nightmare.
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