Wednesday

Transition, 12x16x1.5 inches oil on stretched canvas by Kenney Mencher A body positive painting depicting two bears.


Transition, 12x16x1.5 inches oil on stretched canvas by Kenney Mencher $425

This painting also is important to me because it allows me to express my feelings about gay relationships, body positivity and representing people who often are at the very least, not represented by mainstream culture in a positive way, and also not seen as being beautiful. It’s very clear to me that there are a lot of people who find this kind of body type attractive or beautiful. I certainly do and that’s why I like to paint them.

This painting took a couple of weeks to complete. My working method is that I will often spend a couple of days sketching out or drawing compositions on anywhere between three to 10 canvases with a crayon to try to get the underdrawing correct and work on the compositions. Sometimes these underdrawings are actually very detailed and I’ll even shade them and make marks on them to give myself a sense of of the direction of the brush marks. One of the things I really like to do is draw and so this satisfies my need to make a study for the painting. I also sometimes make detailed crayon drawings on paper in preparation for these kinds of paintings. The next step is to put down a fairly thick painting on the canvas that I know that I will paint over in later days. This often takes an additional day.

After letting the painting dry for several days, often even letting it sit for a week or two, I’ll return to the painting and start by mixing up large batches of thick, gooey, pasty, paint. I don’t like to thin down the paint because I want the textures to mimic the direction of the planes and contours of the skin and muscles of the figures.  I like to use thick hog’s hair bristles brushes to make the painting because then you can really see the brushwork. I vary the textures by sometimes using sable brushes and I’ll even use plastering knives and palette knives to continue to sculpt or apply the paint. If you look at the painting up close you’ll see that the skin and the hair have distinctly different textures as does the background.

This painting also is important to me because it allows me to express my feelings about body positivity and representing people who often are at the very least, not represented by mainstream culture in a positive way, and also not seen as being beautiful. It’s very clear to me that there are a lot of people who find this kind of body type attractive or beautiful. I certainly do and that’s why I like to paint them.
Many straight folks are unaware of the bear subculture. Hardly a surprise, since a powerful majority rarely concerns itself with the doings of a marginalized minority. When, three or four years ago, I first mentioned bears to my straight friends, none of them knew what I was talking about, though by now at least one of them calls me “The Bear.” Similarly, my heterosexual students, as expert as they might be on current media, seem equally ignorant about this topic.

Most GLBT folks, however, by now seem to know the basics. A “bear” is a hairy, bearded, brawny-to-bulky gay man, usually displaying aspects of traditional masculinity. A cub is a younger version of the same; a wolf is a lean, hairy man; an otter a young version of that. “Woof!” is a lustful expression, meaning essentially: “Tasty! I’d like to climb all over that!” “Grrrrr!” means much the same. As you can see, after twenty-some years of development, the bear community, like any subculture, has its own jargon, sometimes called “bearspeak” or “vocabulary.” It also has its own values, its own style, and its own commodities. There are bear-oriented bars, festivals, music, movies, magazines, and books. There are regional clubs for bears not only in metropolitan centers, where the communities first developed, but also in rural areas.

Since this is on stretched canvas with 1 ½ inch wide stretcher bars and the canvas is wrapped around the back, you don’t necessarily need to frame this piece. You could just stick a nail in the wall and Hang the piece on the wall. Another way of finishing the painting off and making it fit with your décor would be to paint the edges. If you do choose to frame this painting, please don’t go to a framer since they are very expensive, you could easily buy an open back frame from a website like Dickblick.com or Amazon or Etsy since this is a standard size frame.

Tuesday

Win this Drawing for Writing a Short Story

One of the Good Guys,  9x12 inches,
crayon on cotton paper by Kenney Mencher

Write a story about "One of the Good Guys" and win this drawing!

Winner will be announced
April 2, 2024

The story you write should be a "Flash Fiction" which is a complete story in one thousand or fewer words.

The story you write should be a "Flash Fiction" which is a complete story in one thousand or fewer words.

Please post the story in the comment section, you will have to provide your name and an email address in order to be qualified to win or you can e-mail me at kenney.mencher@gmail.com with your info. There is a problem with how many characters can post (only about 4,000) so if you cannot post it.

E-mail it to me at Kenney.Mencher@gmail.com
One of the Good Guys, 18x18x1.5 inches
oil on stretched canvas by Kenney Mencher $625

About ten years ago I did similar contests on my blog and it ended up being a couple of shows at galleries, museums, and schools.  I even printed newspapers and catalogs with it.  

If you search for "Renovated Reputations" on my blog you can see some of the other contests. 

You can also visit this link to see some of the stories and books I made, 

Don't worry, if you don't win, I'll do more contests!

To see more of my art,



Francis Bacon

For all the videos in order with a textbook and study guides please visit:

https://www.kenneymencher.com/


The biography of Francis Bacon is filled with bizarre anecdotes about him trying on women’s clothing when he was a kid, a film in the 1990s featured his relationship with a burglar named George Dyer fell through his studio skylight into his home and he became lovers with a guy. The guy who played James Bond plays Francis Bacon’s lover. Elements of the film and his biography are quite surreal however, when they first started exhibiting his work at one point he was rejected from exhibit for not being surreal enough.

Again, context is everything and Francis Bacon can be linked to other art giants of the 20th century such as Lucian Freud and other Surrealists. The fact that he comes from the upper crust of English society probably did not hurt his career. As an upper-class educated white male (although many biographies insist he didn’t have much education as a child because he was asthmatic) his position in in wealthy English society during the 1930s and 40s Francis Bacon had access to design schools and art history. His formal education, more or less as an interior and furniture designer. 

I am sure his education in general probably provided him with enough information that he could in some ways see the art of art history and incorporate ideas from earlier periods into his work later. Probably some of the biggest influences on him were the early surrealist movement of Dada however, it’s clear his knowledge of art history and such figures as Rembrandt as well as Edvard Munch are clearly referenced in his work. So Francis Bacon is clearly the air to a long continuous line of European artists who reference art history and re-appropriate ideas from earlier periods.


In the same way that some pop musicians’ “sample” earlier works and incorporate things like baselines and themes into new compositions Francis Bacon borrowed from Velasquez, Edward Munch, and Rembrandt. Almost in a form of a kind of the equation in which one plus one plus one equals Francis Bacon.

If you were to describe his work in terms of the formal qualities probably one of the most interesting and important elements in his work is that he paints on the reverse side of canvases. I learned this in watching a documentary video about him in which he described part of his process. He explains that one day she had run out of canvases and so flipped a canvas to the raw side that was on prime unfinished and he liked how the mark making he made was permanent and indelible and so he decided to continue working on raw canvas.

Today, this is caused a lot of problems for conservators and museums that hold Bacon’s work in their collections. The reason being that oil paint interacts with open weave cotton or linen canvas and has a kind of rotting effect on the canvas that the oil paint is adhered to. That’s one of the reasons why artists gesso or prepare the canvas. It keeps the canvas from rotting or interacting in a way with the oil paint in such a way that the painting will deteriorate over time. Bacon was not afraid to experiment with materials and with ideas.

The color in Francis Bacon’s paintings is probably strongly influenced by Munch’s painting and from other expressionist artists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. These artists used color often straight from the tube in a nonlocal highly your or saturated way. The colors, and the randomness of the choices being very different from the idea of warm and cool colors used by the Impressionists who often used nonlocal color.

The paint texture of these reverse canvas paintings is often very thin with flight thick paint called impastos in various areas. More important than the color and the paint quality are probably his use of lines and some geometric forms.  For example, in his study after Velazquez’s portrait, not only does Bacon smear the paint in vertical long stripes, he also does a similar thing to the face in which he smears the face in vertical stripes. He surrounds the figure with almost cartoonlike motion lines at the base of the figure which gives the overall composition a sense of flaring from the bottom and moving up towards the top in an explosive way. The yellow diagonal and almost horizontal lines surrounding the throne are references to the throne but Francis Bacon also used similar forms and arrows like this in many of his other paintings. Some historians have interpreted this as being taken from his training as a designer.

Francis Bacon is not really interested in traditional things such as the accurate portrayal of anatomy, or shading and value structure. When he uses paint, and the way he uses it, is probably closer to how the German expressionists used paint as a way to portray feelings and or emotions, especially those that are unsettling or violent. The symbols Bacon uses in many of his paintings speak to some of this unease or violence.

Doing an iconographic analysis of Francis Bacon’s paintings, one can see that he is clearly references art historical sources but uses the symbols in a kind of reversal or reinterpretation of them.  It is very possible that Bacon is referencing his own sexuality and in particular his proclivity towards rough gay sex that included fairly violent fantasies acted out by his “rough trade” sex partners.

Another strong influence on his iconography and imagery is that he collected some medical journals and was very interested in 19th century scientific photographers such as Eadweard Muybridge.  In one documentary Bacon talked extensively about the imagery in some 19th century dental journals that showed mouths being held open by medical instruments.  This is directly referenced in the mouths in many of his paintings.  In the documentary, Bacon talked about his fascination with these images and that he found the flesh of the open mouths “beautiful” and “sensuous.”

The most popular interpretations of Bacon’s series of “Pope” paintings after Velazquez are that they are an expression of the authoritarianism of the Catholic Church and possibly how the Church might view his sexual orientation and proclivities.  However, he seems to have never made a definitive statement as to what he intended them to mean.  The facts are as follows:

He collected art books and medical journals that he used as reference material, he began painting his “Popes” in 1946 and stopped painting them in the in the mid-1960s and even called the series “silly.”  Although he is known to own many reproductions of Velazquez’s painting of Pope Innocent, historians often comment on the fact that he did not see the painting when he visited Rome in 1954.

 When you research Bacon’s work many of the scholars who write about and interpret the work often include their own “baggage” of ideas in their interpretations of the work often making connections and leaps to film references and other imagery they assume Bacon would have known.  In keeping with the Dada and surrealist notions that their paintings came directly out of their own unconscious and dream state Bacon’s works are perfectly aligned in their mission however, it’s possible that the interpretations of the work were meant to be points of departure for the audience viewing them.  Bacon might not have had a conscious intention of what they meant to him and what the symbols meant.

Northern Bear, 24x36x1.5 inches oil on stretched canvas by Kenney Mencher


Northern Bear, 24x36x1.5 inches oil on stretched canvas by Kenney Mencher $1200

I don’t usually let myself make too many large paintings because they are often too expensive and maybe even too large for my collectors, but they are so much fun to make and I always imagine how they might look in a museum! A big painting holds a wall, makes a statement and there is so much more room for me to experiment with texture, layering, and color.

I made a version of this painting last year and it was 18 by 24 inches. Since that time, the painting has gone viral on Tumblr. It’s been shared almost 1000 times across the platform. In a way social media has allowed me to understand who my “tribe” is and what I can do and what sort of paintings I should make that would please them. This also connects to my desire to make a painting in another format and try other things out. In a way, the smaller older version, is a kind of rehearsal or study for this large painting.

This painting took a couple of weeks to complete. My working method is that I will often spend a couple of days sketching out or drawing compositions on anywhere between three to 10 canvases with a crayon to try to get the underdrawing correct and work on the compositions. Sometimes these underdrawings are actually very detailed and I’ll even shade them and make marks on them to give myself a sense of of the direction of the brush marks. One of the things I really like to do is draw and so this satisfies my need to make a study for the painting. I also sometimes make detailed crayon drawings on paper in preparation for these kinds of paintings. The next step is to put down a fairly thick painting on the canvas that I know that I will paint over in later days. This often takes an additional day.

After letting the painting dry for several days, often even letting it sit for a week or two, I’ll return to the painting and start by mixing up large batches of thick, gooey, pasty, paint. I don’t like to thin down the paint because I want the textures to mimic the direction of the planes and contours of the skin and muscles of the figures.  I like to use thick hog’s hair bristles brushes to make the painting because then you can really see the brushwork. I vary the textures by sometimes using sable brushes and I’ll even use plastering knives and palette knives to continue to sculpt or apply the paint. If you look at the painting up close you’ll see that the skin and the hair have distinctly different textures as does the background.

This painting also is important to me because it allows me to express my feelings about body positivity and representing people who often are at the very least, not represented by mainstream culture in a positive way, and also not seen as being beautiful. It’s very clear to me that there are a lot of people who find this kind of body type attractive or beautiful. I certainly do and that’s why I like to paint them.

Many straight folks are unaware of the bear subculture. Hardly a surprise, since a powerful majority rarely concerns itself with the doings of a marginalized minority. When, three or four years ago, I first mentioned bears to my straight friends, none of them knew what I was talking about, though by now at least one of them calls me “The Bear.” Similarly, my heterosexual students, as expert as they might be on current media, seem equally ignorant about this topic.

Most GLBT folks, however, by now seem to know the basics. A “bear” is a hairy, bearded, brawny-to-bulky gay man, usually displaying aspects of traditional masculinity. A cub is a younger version of the same; a wolf is a lean, hairy man; an otter a young version of that. “Woof!” is a lustful expression, meaning essentially: “Tasty! I’d like to climb all over that!” “Grrrrr!” means much the same. As you can see, after twenty-some years of development, the bear community, like any subculture, has its own jargon, sometimes called “bearspeak” or “vocabulary.” It also has its own values, its own style, and its own commodities. There are bear-oriented bars, festivals, music, movies, magazines, and books. There are regional clubs for bears not only in metropolitan centers, where the communities first developed, but also in rural areas.

Since this is on stretched canvas with 1 ½ inch wide stretcher bars and the canvas is wrapped around the back, you don’t necessarily need to frame this piece. You could just stick a nail in the wall and Hang the piece on the wall. Another way of finishing the painting off and making it fit with your décor would be to paint the edges. If you do choose to frame this painting, please don’t go to a framer since they are very expensive, you could easily buy an open back frame from a website like Dickblick.com or Amazon or Etsy since this is a standard size frame.

Wednesday

Stroganoff, 18x24 inches oil on canvas panel by Kenney Mencher

 

 



This an alla prima painting that was completed in a 12 hour session.


Alla prima refers to a direct painting approach where paint is applied wet on wet without letting earlier layers dry. In Italian, the term alla prima means “at first attempt”.

Paintings created in this approach are usually completed within a single session. This made it popular with the Impressionists, as they were able to more easily capture the fleeting light and color of the environment.

I like to experiment and bounce back and forth between different kinds of techniques and styles as I work in my studio. I think he keeps me fresh as a painter and I don’t slavishly create the same kind of painting over and over again.

One of the things that my new batch of paintings has in common is the fact that I’m trying to incorporate a little bit more of an environment around some of the figures to create a little bit more of a story or a bit of mystery about who the character is and what they’re doing. Another thing that I’ve been incorporating into some of my new work works is a little bit more the use of blues and a fuller spectrum or palette of colors.


This painting still has a lot of the main themes that I like to work with such as,older hairier men and the idea of appreciating different body types. I like to represent everyone rather than just a tiny cross-section of humanity.

This was painted on a canvas panel, which is a very sturdy ground or surface for a painting. It won’t flex a lot and is less likely to be damaged in shipping then stretched canvases. Although I tend to be really good at boxing and packaging the paintings I ship. This is a standard size and you won’t have much trouble finding it’s called an “open back” painting or framing kit on the web or at a local art store.

Monday

I Don't Know Much About Him, 30x40x1.5 inches oil on stretched canvas by Kenney Mencher






This painting is based in the tenets of the “body positivity” movement. Body positivity refers to the assertion that all people deserve to have a positive body image, regardless of how society and popular culture view ideal shape, size, and appearance.

This is on gallery wrapped canvas so there won’t be a need to frame it.
For years I had trouble accepting my body as I aged. So I began to paint and draw people who looked more like me and I realized I wasn’t alone when I discovered other bears and the concepts behind “body positivity.”
Some of the goals of the body positivity movement include:
Challenging how society views the body

Promoting the acceptance of all bodies



Helping people build confidence and acceptance of their own bodies

Addressing unrealistic body standards

In gay culture, a bear is a larger and often hairier man who projects an image of rugged masculinity.

Many straight folks are unaware of the bear subculture. Hardly a surprise, since a powerful majority rarely concerns itself with the doings of a marginalized minority. When, three or four years ago, I first mentioned bears to my straight colleagues in the English Department at Virginia Tech, none of them knew what I was talking about, though by now at least one of them calls me “The Bear.” Similarly, my heterosexual students, as expert as they might be on current media, seem equally ignorant about this topic.

Most GLBT folks, however, by now seem to know the basics. A “bear” is a hairy, bearded, brawny-to-bulky gay man, usually displaying aspects of traditional masculinity. A cub is a younger version of the same; a wolf is a lean, hairy man; an otter a young version of that. “Woof!” is a lustful expression, meaning essentially: “Tasty! I’d like to climb all over that!” “Grrrrr!” means much the same. As you can see, after twenty-some years of development, the bear community, like any subculture, has its own jargon, sometimes called “bearspeak” or “vocabulary.” It also has its own values, its own style, and its own commodities. There are bear-oriented bars, festivals, music, movies, magazines, and books. There are regional clubs for bears not only in metropolitan centers, where the communities first developed, but also in rural areas.

The paint on this is super thick and it took several days to make the painting. Recently I moved from California, where I had a pretty cramped small studio, to a larger house where I’ve taken the entire basement as my painting studio. This is allowed me to experiment and try out new things that I have never been able to do because I have a lot more space and places for things to dry and services to work on. I can work on paintings over several days or weeks rather than have to rush through them and work on only one painting at a time.

This is one of a group of paintings that were worked on over the course of a week or two in a more layered approach. It began more as a rough sketch on the canvas panel that I worked out a little bit more with crayon and worked out the shading and environment using my imagination. Over the next couple of days the painting was developed more.

The next couple of days were spent working on an underpainting that began his thin washes of oil paint and ended up with thicker more opaque layers.

The finishing day that I worked on this painting I attempted to build up the surface is more and enhance the textures so that the paint textures matched a little bit more closely the physicality or textures of the figures and the environment they are in. Some of the paint is almost 2 to 3 cm thick and applied with plastering knives and thick bristle brushes which I think gives the surface and almost skin like quality.

Tuesday

A Work in Progress. An underpainting using enamel oil paints.

 

 

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You're the first to hearabout this one, friend.
 
Block 8th
 

I'm gonna make this short and sweet, friend,
 
As an artist, I am so excited to celebrate World Art Day on April 15th. It's a day where we recognize the power and importance of art in our lives, and I encourage everyone to take some time to appreciate the beauty that surrounds us. Whether it's admiring a breathtaking painting or listening to a moving piece of music, art has a way of touching our hearts and souls in a way that nothing else can.
 
But there's something else I want to talk to you about that's equally important to me as an artist: buying directly from the artist. When you buy a piece of art from a middle-man website, you're not only paying for the art itself, but also for the costs associated with the sale of the work. This can add up to 35-50% of the total price, which means that the artists sometimes receive half of what you pay to the middle-man. However, when you buy directly from the artist, you not only get a one-on-one experience, but you also save that extra money. It's a win-win situation! 
 
So, this World Art Day, I encourage you to not only appreciate the art around you but also to support artists by buying directly from them. It's a small gesture that can make a big impact on an artist's life, and you might even discover a new favorite artist along the way!
 

 
 
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HERE ARE A FEW NEW ORIGINALS IN MY SHOP
 
Block 21st
 
Block 23rd
 
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