Monday

Grant Inquisitator,  oil on canvas panel 11x14 inches by Kenney Mencher

In this painting I was thinking about color quite a bit. About two years ago I got an ad from the paint company that sold alkyd paints. They offered a box of nearly 30 or 40 poorly labeled and damaged tubes of paint.  It was a wonderful chance to start experimenting with some colors that I had never played with before. Sometimes, the tube was so damaged that once I opened it I needed to use up quite a bit of it and so I felt free to really use up a lot of paint. One of the other things that this wonderful paint was like is that he tried virtually overnight if it was medium coats of paint. So if I didn't paint super thick one of the things I could do is make the painting and it would drive fairly quickly I could ship it. A byproduct of this is that I can also play with texture a lot more because I can paint a little bit more thickly and in about a week or two the painting will try and then I can actually ship it safely through the mail.

In this case I used a sort of saturated green in the background.  Alkyd paints have a much stronger dye in than the paints that I'm used to. So one of the things that are able to do is amplify the color a little bit more with the alkyd paint and its opening up my experiences to playing with color. So in this case I'm playing with almost complementary colors of green and orange.

Most of my images start with pictures that I find on the Internet and I want to experiment with. What I'll do is I'll see a picture of a handsome man on tumbler or something like that and I'll put it in a folder to use as reference material. The next thing I do is, when I choose that particular piece of reference material I think about what the essence of the original image was. Who was that person and why was this photograph taken how is this person attractive?

In this case I decided that the guys face and the expression on his space including his eyes was the most important thing that I could look at. So what I did was I cropped down on a much larger image, then I convert it to black and white. Then I think about what I'm trying to amplify or say about this person. So part of the idea here is that I'm playing with tongs and punted kinds of names and that's a way that I am giving you a sense of what I think about this person. All of that's besides the fact that he's a really good looking guy.

To learn more about me and my art visit 
www.kenney-mencher.com

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