Set of 5 Original Prints – 1994 Intaglio, Signed, Fresh Finds Collection by Kenney Mencher (Set #4)

 

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This is a curated set of five intaglio prints I made in 1994 while I was still deep in grad school and figuring out my visual language. These are all original prints—not reproductions—and each one comes from a small edition or is a state proof. They’ve been kept in flat files for decades and I’m releasing them now as part of my Fresh Finds archive project.

The set includes:

• "Back Room" (11x15 inches): A dramatic, noir-style composition with four figures seated in a circle under a hanging light. Printed in black and gray aquatint, this one plays with atmosphere and the psychology of group dynamics.

• "Cabby" (8.5x11 inches): A street-side encounter between a man leaning into a cab and a driver turning back to look at him. Strong diagonals and tension-filled posture make this one feel like a film still.

• "Greta’s" (11x15 inches): A quiet figure stands in front of a window, their back turned. Simple lines and shadows build a sense of solitude. The off-white rag paper gives it a soft, warm tone.

• "Rear Window" (6x8 inches): A small vertical composition of a figure in profile wearing a fedora, watching someone framed in a high-up window. This is a state proof, showing my early development of this plate.

• "A Smoke & a Paper" (11x11 inches): A solitary figure in a scarf and jacket holds a cigarette and a newspaper. You can feel the pause in the moment. The textures are gritty and subtle thanks to intaglio techniques.

Each print is handmade, hand-pulled, and signed. The styles vary slightly but they’re all in the same world—part social realism, part cinematic noir, with a focus on narrative through gesture and shadow. These images come from the same place that shaped a lot of my painting: a mix of mid-century film, Edward Hopper, Bay Area Figurative influences, and queer-coded storytelling.

This set tells a quiet, moody story about observation, isolation, and coded meaning. And like a lot of my early work, it’s deeply tied to identity—especially gay identity during a time when subtlety was a form of safety. Releasing these now feels right. There’s a renewed urgency to show queer work that’s honest, even if it’s not loud. Collecting prints like these is a way to connect to that history—and maybe carry it forward.

Details:

• Medium: Intaglio and aquatint on rag paper

• Year: 1994

• Edition sizes: All limited, most 5–6 prints per edition

• Signed: Yes, all are hand-signed

• Paper sizes range from approx. 6x8 to 11x15 inches

• Condition: Excellent, never framed

• Includes 5 prints: Back Room, Cabby, Gretas, Rear Window, A Smoke & a Paper

• Unframed (ships flat)

• Part of the Fresh Finds archive release

William Hogarth

 

Scholars focus on William Hogarth—not as a painter, but as a printmaker. While Hogarth did paint, he’s better known for his prints. That’s partly because printmaking was more profitable for him. He worked in England during the 1700s and wasn’t really connected with the aristocracy. Instead, he had closer ties to people involved in theater and the performing arts. His connections with the theater world influenced his art, especially his attention to character and narrative. If you check out his biography, you’ll notice how deeply involved he was with that part of English society.

As a painter, Hogarth wasn’t known for refined portraiture, which was the genre that brought the most fame and money in England during that time. His style leaned more toward caricature, and he preferred painting genre scenes—pictures of everyday life. Because of this, he didn’t fit in neatly with movements like rococo, which was more popular in France. While he was active during the baroque and rococo periods, his work doesn’t follow the typical themes of either. He often made fun of French tastes and aesthetics, and some of his prints include visual jokes at their expense.

Art historians often have a hard time placing Hogarth into one style category. His work doesn’t follow established trends, which makes him stand out. In some ways, he’s more like Albrecht Dürer, a German printmaker from the 1500s who also produced detailed prints with strong moralizing messages and tried to reach wider audiences by selling prints instead of relying on commissions.

Two of Hogarth’s well-known prints, Beer Street and Gin Lane, were created as a pair. These are called a diptych—just two works meant to be seen together. They were made around the mid-1700s during a time when England was dealing with a real public health problem linked to cheap gin. New methods for fast, low-cost distillation had made gin widely available, and overuse led to social problems, especially in poor urban neighborhoods. Gin became a kind of early drug crisis, similar to how people now talk about epidemics related to drugs like crack cocaine.

Some of Hogarth’s friends encouraged him to make prints about this, hoping the visuals would raise awareness about the issue. Beer Street shows a positive scene. People in the image are healthy, well-fed, and seem to be doing well economically. They’re holding mugs of beer, and the overall mood is calm and stable. There’s a sign painter in the image who’s smiling as he paints a sign showing people dancing on a pile of barley—a plant used to brew beer. That barley pile connects beer to agriculture and honest work. The buildings are in good shape, and everyone seems to have a purpose.

But when you move your eye across the picture, you’ll spot something that shows the contrast: a pawnbroker shop. That detail suggests not everyone is doing great and sets up the contrast with the second image, Gin Lane, which shows the effects of gin addiction and social breakdown. These two prints together show Hogarth’s way of telling visual stories with humor, puns, and strong moral points built into the details.

In Beer Street and Gin Lane, William Hogarth uses side-by-side prints to compare two different versions of urban life in mid-1700s England. These prints were sold as a set and meant to be hung together. They were part of a campaign to raise awareness about the rise in gin consumption and the effects it had on poor communities. Beer, at that time, was seen as safer and healthier than water in many areas of England. Light beer or small ale often had only 1–2% alcohol and was used as a way to purify water. It was also calorie-rich, which helped people stay nourished. Gin, on the other hand, was a stronger distilled liquor that caused quicker addiction and more harmful effects.

In Beer Street, Hogarth shows a clean and active neighborhood. People appear healthy and content. On the rooftops, workers are reroofing buildings while drinking beer. Barrels are being lowered from windows. Everyone seems busy but relaxed. A boy hands a flagon of beer to a man standing below, adding to the image of social connection. One sign painter is painting a pub sign showing people dancing on a pile of barley—a crop used in beer-making. He’s smiling while he works. The buildings are in good repair, and the streets are filled with movement. In one part of the scene, you can spot a pawnbroker shop labeled “Pinch.” The building looks run-down and unstable. This plays on the idea that pawnbrokers were seen as preying on poor people, especially in times of hardship. The name “Pinch” is also a pun, suggesting financial pressure and discomfort.

There’s more wordplay in the scene, too. A woman on the left holds a key, which may connect to themes of virtue and trust. A cheerful fishmonger stands nearby. Books are visible in the bottom corner, possibly referencing literacy or education. Hogarth often included literary references and puns in his work.

In contrast, Gin Lane shows a neighborhood in collapse. On the left side, the pawnbroker shop is clean and well-kept, suggesting that business is thriving—but for the wrong reasons. The shop is labeled “S. Gripe,” another pun about exploitation. Around the shop, things are falling apart. Buildings are crumbling, and a man is seen hanging from a beam. Dead bodies are being carried in coffins. On the right, the “Kilman Distillery” pumps out gin. Below it, a small child is being fed gin directly from a bottle, and a group of people are drinking heavily.

In the lower left, children fight over a bare bone with a dog. There’s no sign of food production or farming—just desperation. A woman sits on stairs so drunk that her baby slips from her arms and falls into the street. In the lower right, a man lies on the ground, skeletal and weak. A block of text next to him reads, The Downfall of Mrs. Gin. This is a reference to the idea that gin destroys households. The skeletal man is sometimes interpreted as “Mr. Gin,” showing the final stage of addiction.

Hogarth’s prints were created to warn people about the dangers of gin. The contrast between the two scenes was meant to deliver a moral message in a visual format. His work was widely circulated, and it played a role in public campaigns that led to the Gin Act of 1751 (not 1738 or 1748), which limited gin sales and tried to reduce alcohol abuse in cities.

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Arc, 11x14 inches crayon on cotton paper by Kenney Mencher A crayon drawing of a cropped muscular male torso, arched spine, hairy armpits

 

I tried to draw as much as I can. Most of the time I spend my days working on oil paintings in my studio. However, I spend a lot of time in the evenings as I watch TV and listen to music or audiobooks drawing.

I use a light fast black crayon to draw rather than a pencil. Mainly because pencil can smear more easily and the same goes for working with charcoal. I’ve found that working with crayon makes the drawing much more durable and less susceptible to getting smudged or damaged especially during shipping. I also draw on a superheavy cotton fiber paper called Rives BFK. It’s kind of an expensive paper because it’s supposed to be used for printmaking and it’s made out of cotton rather than wood pulp. This makes it feel deliciously thick and sturdy almost like one is trying on the same paper that used to make money.

Drawing is the way that I started painting but it’s also a way that I allow my imagination to run free and experiment with different subjects, techniques, and composition. In this drawing, I was working with the rule of thirds which is a compositional concept in which you try to create an asymmetrical composition by placing the subject or focus of the composition in one of the corners of the page rather than in the center.

I also played with composition by cropping as well as shifting the subject matter to the edges of the page. Often I like to have the figure “kiss” or touch the edges of the picture rather than float free in the center.

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18th C History Painting

 

We're moving into the late 1700s and heading into the 1800s, and there’s a lot happening during that time. Some historians call this the long nineteenth century because they think the big changes that shaped the 1800s got going in the 1780s. That idea kind of makes sense, especially when you look at the styles and cultural shifts starting to show up at the end of the 18th century. Styles start branching out more here—some become more formal, and some get more symbolic. This adds a layer of complexity when studying art from this period. You’ll notice that artists start becoming strongly associated with particular styles, so it helps to link their names to how their work looks.

Take Benjamin West as an example. He was born in America but worked in England and had patrons there. While it might be tempting to just call him an English painter, it’s more accurate to describe him as an American artist working under English patronage. His work often focused on English subjects, and one of the genres he worked in was called history painting. That term doesn’t mean it's about ancient history necessarily—it’s more like a staged scene of current or recent events. You can think of it kind of like a news photo that’s been retouched or set up for dramatic effect.

Looking at one of West’s well-known paintings, it helps to focus on how it’s built up visually. The arrangement of figures is sort of flat across the front, like a frieze—a design style that goes back to things like the Ara Pacis Augustae in Rome or the Panathenaic procession in ancient Greece. The figures are pushed toward the front of the painting, almost like a shallow relief sculpture. They’re posed with these exaggerated gestures meant to show emotion, but also a bit theatrical, almost like they’re posing or voguing for the viewer.

Behind them, there’s another set of figures in the background that are less clear. These are shown with sfumato or atmospheric perspective, where the haze makes things look more distant. As you look further back, the smoke and clouds blur the details even more, adding depth and mood to the scene.

The lighting in the painting helps shape the bodies. There’s a clear light source coming from the left, casting shadows, and creating a sense of volume through techniques known as chiaroscuro and tenebrism. These are terms for how light and shadow are used to model the figures, making them look three-dimensional. The brightest part of the light falls on a wounded figure in the middle, drawing your eye there. What makes that even more noticeable is the diagonal line running through the painting, created by a flag and the shapes of the clouds. That diagonal helps guide your eye and adds energy to the scene.

A lot of what West is doing here comes from what he learned from earlier artists like Caravaggio and Velázquez. He’s borrowing techniques like dramatic lighting and strong composition to heighten the storytelling. These were tools used in Baroque painting, and West is applying them to a modern historical subject, blending old methods with recent events.

One way to look at Benjamin West’s painting The Death of General Wolfe is by focusing on the iconography, which basically means the use of symbols and visual elements that carry meaning. This painting doesn’t just tell a story through how it looks—it also connects to historical context and some ideas that were going around in the 1700s.

During the 18th century, there were ongoing struggles between European powers over land in the Americas. England and France were especially active in trying to claim territory because they saw the Americas as a source of valuable natural resources. Controlling these resources was seen as a way to strengthen their economies, especially during the early phases of industrialization. The British and French both formed alliances with Native American groups during these conflicts. In Canada, for example, a series of battles known as the French and Indian Wars took place, where both sides relied on Native American support.

At the same time, Europeans were still trying to figure out how to categorize and understand Native American cultures. After Columbus arrived in the Americas, questions were raised in Europe about whether Indigenous people had souls or could be “saved.” Over time, this led to the idea that Native Americans were what European thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau might call noble savages—people who lived outside of European civilization but were still seen as naturally moral or pure in some way. This idea was used to justify attempts to convert them to Christianity. It wasn’t just a personal belief system; it shaped how artists, writers, and governments talked about Indigenous people.

These ideas show up in West’s painting. He was an American-born painter working in England, and he often supported British perspectives in his work. In this painting, he shows General James Wolfe, a British officer, dying during the 1759 Battle of Quebec. Wolfe is placed in the center of the scene, surrounded by a group of men. His pose and the way he’s lit make him look a lot like traditional images of Christ, especially from scenes known as depositions, where Christ is taken down from the cross. The way Wolfe's body is shown—laid out and gently supported by those around him—closely matches the structure of those religious paintings.

West used this setup to make Wolfe appear as a kind of martyr, but instead of dying for religion, Wolfe is shown dying for his country. The British flag in the scene is positioned in a way that mirrors how a cross might appear in a Christian painting, reinforcing the connection. This kind of imagery wasn’t new—artists had used religious symbolism for centuries—but here, it’s being used to support national identity and politics rather than religion.

The painting reflects how visual art in the late 1700s began to play a role in shaping political ideas, not just spiritual ones. The symbols used—like Wolfe’s pose, the lighting, and the arrangement of figures—are pulled from earlier Christian imagery and adapted to tell a national story.

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Nocturnal Bear, 18x18x1.5 oil on stretched canvas by Kenney Mencher

  

Since I moved to my new home I’ve been able to use the space to take my painting to the next level. Having an entire basement as a painting studio has been allowing me to try out different things physically with paints and work on up to three or more paintings at a time over several days. Sometimes I’ll do a rough sketch on canvas in crayon and come back and add things to it over several days. That’s the case with this painting of my Nocturnal Bear.

I knew that I wanted to work with the themes of body positivity and celebrated the heavier male bear like form but I also have been trying to add a little bit more of a story in each of the paintings. In this one I thought it would be a nice idea to provide a little bit more of a setting of a bullish or bearish like character almost stomping through a suburban setting at night.

I think I got the lighting and the rim lighting of the figure just right and I’ve been pulling some other colors into my palette such as cerulean blues and grays.

This painting is on stretched canvas with extra thick stretcher bars so you don’t need to frame it.

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19th C French Academic, Romanticism, and Orientalism

 

By the early 1800s, neoclassicism had become an extremely popular art style. Even though Napoleon lost power and was exiled, the style stayed dominant. Jacques-Louis David, a key figure in this movement, continued to influence art through his role at the École des Beaux-Arts—a French school for training artists, architects, and designers. The school had been founded in the 1670s by a French culture minister and had evolved into a center for fine arts education. David took charge during the French Revolution and remained influential afterward.

David’s students carried on his neoclassical style. One of the most important of them was Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (pronounced like “Ang”). Ingres continued to paint in the neoclassical tradition, but he also painted other types of subjects, so he’s usually described as part of academic painting or French academic painting.

One of Ingres's major works shows Homer—the ancient Greek poet known for writing the Iliad and the Odyssey—in the center, being honored like a cultural hero. Around him are famous philosophers, scientists, and artists, many of whom were French. This painting is called Apotheosis of Homer. Apotheosis means to raise someone to the level of a god.

Ingres’s painting updates ideas seen in another famous work: Raphael’s School of Athens. That painting also shows many great thinkers from the past. In the center are Plato and Aristotle, with other figures like Michelangelo shown as ancient philosophers. Raphael even included a small self-portrait. All the people in Raphael’s painting wear clothing from ancient times.

In contrast, the people in Ingres’s painting are dressed in ways that don’t match the historical period of ancient Greece. This is called anachronistic. Ingres was trying to show how the great figures of French and European culture were part of a tradition that began in classical times. He placed Homer in the center, then showed ancient thinkers like Socrates, Pericles, and Aristotle behind him, with more modern figures closer to the front of the painting.

At the bottom, there are symbolic figures representing Homer’s two epics—the Iliad and the Odyssey. In the foreground are people from the 1700s and later, including Mozart, Poussin, Molière, and Racine—important figures in French culture.

Ingres’s painting connects modern French culture to the classical past. He’s showing that French writers, artists, and musicians are continuing a long tradition. This was typical of neoclassical painting, but Ingres gave it an updated twist by including more recent figures and dressing them in clothing from their own times.

 

There are some things in Ingres’s work that can seem strange or even uncomfortable when you think about them. Some of what he does in his paintings feels like a return to the styles of earlier art periods like mannerism, baroque, and rococo. In history, when art goes through a time focused on high morals or serious ideas, it often swings back toward more pleasure-focused or even self-indulgent themes.

While Ingres makes classical references in his paintings, many of them are also ways to show the nude body, mainly for visual enjoyment. Ingres and others around him even developed new ways of painting the human body that focused on physical beauty.

One example is Jupiter and Thetis. This painting is highly detailed and realistic, which makes it seem believable. At the same time, it’s very sensual. In the image, Jupiter (or Zeus) is sitting on a throne while Thetis kneels in front of him. The setup looks like a male fantasy, with a sexual element to it.

The way the figures look shows what 19th-century artists thought was the ideal body. Jupiter is large, square-shouldered, and looks well-fed. Some have compared his appearance to an opera singer. Thetis has soft features, sloped shoulders, and visible body fat under the skin. This body type was seen as the standard of female beauty in France at the time.

Under Jupiter’s foot, there is a small classical frieze, a carved decoration that refers to ancient Greek art. So again, there’s a classical element used to frame the painting.

On the right is another painting, La Grande Odalisque. An odalisque is a word the French used for a harem girl, usually from the Middle East or North Africa. These areas were often under Islamic control or part of the Ottoman Empire during the time the painting was made.

There are social and political meanings in this image. A well-known author, Linda Nochlin, wrote about it in her article The Imaginary Orient. She was influenced by the ideas of Edward Said, a scholar from the Middle East. Nochlin’s main point is that during the 19th century, as France became more involved in North Africa and the Middle East, French artists created unrealistic images of that region. These images made people from those areas seem less advanced than Europeans.

The artists used very realistic painting styles to make it look like these scenes were true. This gave the paintings an anthropological feel, like they were showing real life. But in many ways, these images were false and political. They weren’t based on what life was actually like in those places.

In La Grande Odalisque, the woman is surrounded by items like incense, feathers, silk, and jewelry. These are luxury goods, or commodities, and her body is shown in a similar way—as something to be looked at and desired. This is a lot like how women are used in advertising today, where they’re often shown next to expensive products like cars or alcohol.

At the same time, the painting presents the Arab or Islamic world as being morally weak. It shows people as lazy, smoking opium, and focused only on sex and pleasure. This was not true of Islam or those cultures at that time. It was a made-up image shaped by European ideas and goals.

Another problem is that the woman in the painting has pale, white skin. If she is supposed to be a harem girl from the Middle East, her skin tone doesn’t match. This makes it even clearer that this isn’t a realistic portrait. It’s a European version of what they imagined the “Orient” to be—any place east of Paris.

Linda Nochlin’s argument is that orientalism—the way Europe represented Eastern cultures in art—was often a way to hide the fact that the art was focused on looking at beautiful women and expensive goods.

You can also say the same thing about some uses of classicism in art. Ingres was a highly skilled painter, but many of his works supported French ideas about empire and power. These paintings helped promote the idea that France had a right to take over foreign lands by suggesting that those cultures were less developed or were falling apart. 

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On the Patio, 30x40x1.5 inches, oil on stretched canvas, by Kenney Mencher

 

This painting is called On the Patio. It’s 30x40 inches, oil on stretched canvas, and painted in 2025. Even though it’s recent, it connects with ideas I’ve been working through for years—especially in my Fresh Finds series. I think of this as a bit of a return to form—playing with some of the formal strategies of Bay Area Figurative painters like Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn, especially their use of thick texture, abstracted backgrounds, and that in-between space where figure and environment blur.

The subject is a woman seated on a balcony or small patio, bathed in warm sunlight. Her pose is natural—legs crossed, arms resting loosely—and her face is partially turned down in thought. She’s wearing a white dress, and her hair spills over her shoulders in a soft, expressive mass. The figure is treated more naturalistically in terms of anatomy and posture, but the handling of the background—especially the bricks and shuttered windows—is stylized with thick, directional brushstrokes and a warm palette of ochres, rust, and gray-blues.

This piece was also an experiment in texture and edge. The paint application is loose and layered. I used impasto in areas of the background and some dry brushing in the figure’s highlights. You can see a lot of palette knife work in the brick wall behind her. I pushed warm and cool contrasts—especially between the glowing yellow wall and the cooler shadows inside the apartment—to build a sense of depth and atmosphere.

The composition is asymmetrical and follows the rule of thirds—the figure sits in the lower right third of the canvas while the open doorway on the left leads the eye inward. There’s a nice play between verticals (doorframe, railing) and the diagonals of light and shadow across the figure’s legs and arms. The scene feels quiet, observational, and intimate—more about presence and place than narrative.

Unlike a lot of my more political or queer-centered work, this one doesn’t make a loud cultural statement. But it still reflects what matters to me as a painter: the act of close looking, attention to light, honoring everyday moments. That, too, is a kind of resistance—slowing down, observing, seeing beauty in ordinary things.

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Color Theory, Impressionism, and Cinematography

Color is at the center of what Degas and most of the Impressionists were doing. To understand Impressionist painting, it helps to know how color works and how to talk about it. Instead of just saying a painting looks nice, it's useful to be able to name what’s going on with color, light, and shadow. That’s especially important in Impressionism, since these artists were focused on capturing how light affects color—what some called colored light.

One basic term is hue, which just means color. You’ll see this word on paint tubes—hue refers to the name of the color itself. There are three main levels: primary, secondary, and tertiary.

Primary colors are red, blue, and yellow. These can’t be made by mixing other colors. When you mix two primary colors, you get a secondary color. For example, red and yellow make orange, blue and yellow make green, and red and blue make violet.

Tertiary colors come from mixing a primary color with a nearby secondary color, like red-orange or yellow-green. But when you mix two complementary colors—which are across from each other on the color wheel—you get brown. For instance, mixing orange and blue makes a type of brown. That’s because orange is made from red and yellow, and when you add blue, you’re combining all three primary colors. Depending on how much of each you use, you can get warm browns or cool browns. These are sometimes called earth tones, and include paint names like burnt sienna (a reddish brown) and burnt umber (a cooler, bluish brown). These kinds of tones showed up a lot in earlier painters like Velázquez.

Another key idea is intensity, also called saturation. Both words describe how pure a color is. A fully saturated color looks strong and clear. If you add white, you get a lighter version, called a tint, but it also becomes less intense. If you add black, the color darkens and also loses some of its intensity. Either way, adding black or white reduces the purity of the color. You can also lower intensity by mixing in the color’s complement. This “dulls” the color without making it lighter or darker. The changes in intensity can make a big difference in how the color feels in a painting.

Value structure refers to how light or dark something is. It's closely related to chiaroscuro, which means the use of light and shadow to create a sense of depth. Value structure works independently from hue (color) and saturation (intensity), but the three still affect one another. Understanding value can be confusing at first, especially when you're just starting to study color. The eye is actually built to detect light and shadow before it detects color. The retina contains more rods—which are sensitive to brightness—than cones, which detect color.

One example of how context affects value is a gray strip placed over a gradient of light to dark tones. Even though the gray strip stays exactly the same, it looks darker at the top when surrounded by lighter tones and lighter at the bottom when surrounded by darker ones. This effect shows how the brain interprets value based on surrounding contrast.

When color is added to value changes, the effect becomes even stronger. For instance, a strip of blue that shifts from light to dark with an orange-brown center strip appears to change depending on where it's placed. The blue and orange enhance each other because they are complementary colors—opposites on the color wheel. This contrast can make the colors appear more intense.

Colors also have temperature associations. Cool colors like blue, blue-green, and violet are linked with water and tend to visually recede. Warm colors like red, orange, and yellow are linked with fire and appear to come forward. These warm-cool relationships can make color stand out more depending on how they are used together.

For example, if you take a blue dot and place it on a dark background, it might look bright and stand out. If you move the same blue dot onto a mid-tone area, it may seem less vibrant. On a similarly dark blue background, it can almost disappear. This shows how a color’s surroundings affect how intense or noticeable it seems. The same is true for orange. On a blue background, orange appears brighter because it is the complementary color of blue. When converted to black and white, both may have nearly the same value, but in color, they look very different.

Mixing complementary colors reduces saturation. For example, adding yellow to purple makes the purple less intense and shifts its tone. This is one of the basic ideas behind optical mixing, a method used by the Impressionists. Instead of physically mixing paint, artists like Degas would apply slashes of pure color—such as yellow and green—side by side. From a distance, the eye blends them, creating a different color without actually combining the pigments.

This is where intensity becomes important. Intensity—or saturation—is the purity of a color. A fully saturated color is clear and strong. When white is added, the color becomes lighter and less intense (a tint). When black is added, the color becomes darker and also loses intensity. Intensity affects how we perceive light and shadow. For instance, a strip of green that fades from saturated to desaturated may appear to shift in brightness, but when turned to grayscale, it shows little change in value. This highlights how color and value can be confused.

In two paintings by Degas, these relationships become clear. One painting has a low-key palette, meaning it mostly uses subdued browns and tertiary colors. It has just a few bright red areas. The second painting uses a full range of more saturated, secondary colors, with little or no brown. It also includes strong contrasts between warm and cool colors—like orange and blue—across the canvas.

The painting with more intense color and warm-cool contrast appears to have stronger value structure, with more noticeable light and shadow. When both images are converted to black and white, the differences in shading aren’t as extreme. This shows that the use of warm and cool colors in the second painting creates the appearance of more depth and contrast, even when the actual value differences are similar.

To wrap up the idea of how color works beyond painting, it also plays a major role in film. One example is the movie Far From Heaven, which uses color deliberately throughout its scenes. The film is set in the 1950s and focuses on race and personal relationships. In it, different color palettes are used to reflect different emotional and narrative moments.

When the main female character is shown dealing with her husband's struggles—he’s closeted and unhappy—those scenes often have a greenish tint. This green tone becomes a repeated element tied to his storyline. When she visits an art museum and starts forming a connection with another character, a Black man, the palette shifts and becomes more colorful, including a broader range of hues. Color is used to reinforce emotional tone and relationships across the film.

In one still from the movie, she's sitting in a dim room with a bright light coming from the right. This lighting setup recalls chiaroscuro, a technique used in Baroque painting, especially by Caravaggio, where a sharp light cuts across the figure to create a sense of volume. But when the image is converted to black and white, the lighting appears more even than it seemed in color. The film uses warm light on one side and cooler blue tones on the other to create the illusion of strong contrast, even if the values are close in brightness. Color, in this case, enhances the feeling of shadow and light.

Degas worked with similar techniques. In his pastel drawing The Morning Bath, a woman is shown entering a tub. There’s a bluish tone on one side of her body—this is an example of non-local color, meaning it’s not the actual skin color but a chosen hue used to suggest shadow or cooler light. On the opposite side, he uses warmer colors. This warm-cool shift adds volume to the form and helps create the illusion of depth. When the drawing is shown in black and white, much of this effect disappears. Degas also used optical mixing in areas like the drapery, where broken lines of color are placed close together so they visually blend when viewed from a distance. 

Another thing to note about Degas and other Impressionists is that, even though they often said their work was about light, color, and formal studies, the subject matter still reflected certain cultural views. Many of their works include nude female figures. These choices align with traditional representations of women from a male perspective—a concept often referred to as the male gaze. This can be seen in how Degas depicts the female body. A different approach can be found in the work of Mary Cassatt, who also painted women but from a different, often more private or everyday perspective. Her work presents a contrast to the more detached or observational way that male Impressionists portrayed the female figure.

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Charlemagne, 18x18x1.5 inches oil on stretched canvas by Kenney Mencher

 

My oil painting Charlemagne is an 18x18-inch piece on stretched canvas with a depth of 1.5 inches. The portrait features a contemporary interpretation of what Charlemagne might have looked like, based on a combination of historical references and a modern face that caught my attention. The painting is executed in the alla prima technique, meaning it was completed in one session while the paint was still wet. The brushwork varies in thickness, with bold, expressive strokes capturing the texture of the skin, hair, and clothing. The background remains loose and undefined, allowing the focus to stay on the subject’s face. The color palette includes natural skin tones, muted earth tones, and subtle highlights that enhance the sense of depth and structure.

This piece connects to my ongoing interest in portraiture, a fascination that started when I was young. I’ve always been drawn to painting faces, something that goes back to a junior high school teacher who first introduced me to facial proportions and structure. Later, during high school, I studied under Irwin Greenberg and Max Ginsburg in their early morning atelier, where we painted from live models and learned about historical painters like Rembrandt, Velázquez, and Sargent. These experiences shaped my approach to portraiture, blending traditional techniques with a more direct, expressive application of paint.

In this case, I was particularly interested in reimagining Charlemagne, one of the most significant figures of the Middle Ages. While historical records give us only stylized representations of his appearance, I wanted to approach this as a character study, envisioning how he might have looked in a more naturalistic way. This painting also ties into my work as an art history instructor, where I’ve been revisiting ancient and medieval art, including coinage and sculptures that depict historical rulers.

This painting is on deep stretcher bars, so framing isn’t necessary, though it can easily be framed using standard 18x18-inch frame kits. The edges can be left raw or painted to match the artwork. The piece reflects my broader practice of exploring history through contemporary faces and quick, expressive painting techniques. It’s part of my ongoing effort to merge historical themes with modern interpretations in portraiture.

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Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso was an artist who changed a lot over his lifetime, and he's usually a big part of art history classes. To keep it simple, let’s just hit some key points.

If you compare Picasso’s early work to Paul Cézanne’s paintings, you can see how Picasso’s style started to shift. Cézanne had this way of breaking down objects into basic shapes, which influenced later artists. He didn’t use straight realism—he sort of broke things into parts that looked more abstract. This way of simplifying forms had a big effect on how Picasso thought about art.

Many people think Cézanne’s experiments helped open the door for Cubism, which Picasso later helped develop. Cubism uses flat shapes and different angles to show an object all at once. One example of this is Guernica, a painting Picasso made in 1937. It’s large—over 11 feet tall and more than 25 feet wide—and painted in gray, black, and white. It shows people, animals, and buildings in the middle of chaos, based on the bombing of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. The painting doesn’t follow traditional perspective. Instead, it uses overlapping and broken shapes, which are typical in Cubist work.

Before this, Picasso had already shown a lot of skill at a young age. When he was a teenager, he made drawings and paintings that showed he had a solid understanding of anatomy, shading, and proportion. His early pieces looked more traditional and realistic. Later, he started trying new things—using bolder lines, changing proportions, and playing with different ways of seeing the same object.

Picasso painted Science and Charity in 1897 when he was around 15 or 16 years old. It’s an oil painting on canvas, and it's now in the Museo Picasso in Barcelona. At the time he made it, Picasso had already developed strong technical skills. The painting shows careful attention to anatomy, shading, and composition, which are usually taught much later in an artist's training.

The scene in the painting shows a woman lying in bed. On one side of her is a doctor taking her pulse and recording something. On the other side, there’s a nun holding a child. The figures represent two different kinds of help. The doctor stands for science or medicine, while the nun and child represent charity or faith-based care. The title, Science and Charity, names both of these.

Picasso’s father, José Ruiz Blasco, was an art teacher who taught him to draw and paint. Picasso started learning formal art techniques from a young age. He spent time at the Escola de Belles Arts in Barcelona, where his father also taught. By the time he was a teenager, he had already learned the traditional academic approach to painting, including how to build a composition and how to use light and shadow.

This painting was made during a period when young artists were expected to copy classical models and master academic painting before experimenting with new styles. Science and Charity was exhibited in local art shows in Spain and received awards. The people in the painting were modeled from real life—Picasso used his father as the doctor figure.

The painting’s style follows the realist tradition. The figures are shown with lifelike detail, and the setting includes recognizable objects like the iron bed frame and the glass bottle, which help place the scene in a hospital or home care environment from the late 1800s. There are no symbolic objects beyond the figures themselves and their positions. The nun and the child were often used in art of this time to suggest care or religious support, but Picasso doesn’t include any supernatural imagery.

 

This painting was made around the time Picasso finished his formal training as an art student. The subject he chose connects to an earlier tradition in painting—specifically, he’s referencing a theme that artists like Édouard Manet explored. One example is Manet’s The Absinthe Drinker, painted in the 1850s. That subject—a lone person drinking absinthe, a strong alcoholic drink that was also believed to have mind-altering effects—appears in several 19th-century works. Absinthe was popular among some writers and artists, who thought it helped spark creativity.

Picasso's version of the absinthe drinker shows he’s working with the same idea, but using a very different style. Instead of repeating Manet’s approach, Picasso uses what would have been considered a non-traditional or modern visual language at the time. While Manet’s work focused more on realism and used careful shading and proportion, Picasso distorts the figure. He uses flat shapes, strong outlines, and highly saturated colors that aren’t naturalistic. These choices are similar to what artists like Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh were doing in the late 1800s—Gauguin, for instance, often used flat color fields and heavy outlines, and Van Gogh used thick, energetic brushwork and intense colors.

In this painting, Picasso uses a female figure instead of a male one, and the composition is more stylized. The figure is drawn in a way that ignores strict anatomical accuracy, with simplified shapes and exaggerated features. This kind of distortion hadn’t really appeared in European art before, at least not in a deliberate and structured way. There’s also influence from ukiyo-e, a kind of Japanese printmaking that became widely collected in Europe in the late 1800s. These prints often used flattened space and bold outlines, and they helped European artists rethink how to compose an image.

By the early 1900s, photography had made it easier to capture realistic images, so painters were no longer expected to just copy the world as it looked. This gave artists like Picasso more room to explore personal or symbolic uses of color and form. His use of distortion wasn’t accidental—it was a conscious decision to break from earlier rules and experiment with how figures could be represented. The choice to make the figure look simplified or childlike doesn’t mean it was unskilled; Picasso had already shown he could paint with realism earlier in his life. Instead, this approach reflects a shift in what painting could be used for.

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"Mason in the Summer of 1980" – 18x24 on Wood – Kenney Mencher 1994 – Dreamlike Backlit Portrait

 

I painted "Mason in the Summer of 1980" in 1994, almost ten years after the moment it’s based on. It’s oil on wood panel, 18x24 inches, and unframed. The painting is built up in thin layers of translucent color using a large house-painting brush and then refined with smaller brushes and a wipe-out technique in places. I was experimenting with soft edges, backlighting, and cinematic mood.

The background is a wash of pale yellow made from cadmium yellow light mixed with black or gray. The mountains or skyline are muted gray-blue, and that color reflects into the water. Mason’s figure is painted with softened edges and deep, warm shadows. The overall feel is dreamlike and a little hazy—that was intentional. I was trying to capture a memory more than a likeness.

Mason was someone I knew in high school in New York City in the early 1980s, when I was at the High School of Art and Design. She looked like Patti Smith and had this quiet, androgynous confidence. We had this complicated, not-quite-romantic relationship, the kind you remember for years. The painting was based on a photo someone in our group had taken of her—backlit and mysterious. I used to revisit that photo like a keepsake.

This painting is part memory, part homage, and part technical experiment. It’s held up well, and I’m offering it now as part of my early work archive. It’s a personal piece, but maybe it reminds you of someone you once knew too.

This piece is oil on wood, unframed, and signed. It’s part of a series of early works I’ve recently pulled out of storage and made available to collectors. If you’re familiar with my work, this is a great example of where I started. If you’re new to it, this is a straightforward, handmade piece with a real story behind it.
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19th C Romanticism, Walpole

 

The Romantic movement in art and literature was known for its focus on emotion, imagination, and individual experience. Unlike earlier styles that valued order and reason, Romantic artists and writers explored intense feelings, dramatic events, and the darker sides of human nature. They often looked to history, nature, and personal suffering as inspiration. Artists like Horace Walpole created fantasy-like Gothic settings, while others like J.M.W. Turner used light and color to express emotion and moral themes. Painters like Théodore Géricault and Francisco Goya showed real-life tragedies and human cruelty to make people think about justice, suffering, and the flaws in society. Romanticism was about more than beauty—it was about telling powerful stories through emotion, symbolism, and dramatic style.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, figures like Horace Walpole and John Ruskin helped shape how people thought about the Gothic past, though in very different ways. Walpole used Gothic style to create imaginative, theatrical settings like his home, Strawberry Hill, while Ruskin believed that true Gothic architecture held deep moral and spiritual meaning. Around the same time, painter J.M.W. Turner captured intense emotional experiences through light, color, and atmosphere, especially in works like The Slave Ship, which dealt with human cruelty and natural forces. Together, these artists and thinkers reflect the Romantic era’s fascination with history, fantasy, morality, and the emotional power of beauty.

Horace Walpole was an English writer who lived in the 18th century, and he’s known for writing The Castle of Otranto, one of the first novels we now call “Gothic.” He also designed a house called Strawberry Hill, which he remodeled to look like a Gothic castle, even though it wasn’t built in the Gothic period. Instead of being a real medieval structure, it was more like a fantasy version of one—something that fit with his imagination more than with actual history.

Walpole’s redesign of Strawberry Hill included architectural features that looked Gothic, like pointed arches and vaulted ceilings, but they didn’t actually serve the same structural purposes. In real Gothic buildings from the 12th and 13th centuries, those features—like pointed arches, ribbed vaults, and flying buttresses—were part of the building’s support system. At Strawberry Hill, they were just decoration. The house wasn’t built using the same techniques or materials as true Gothic cathedrals. It was more like a theatrical set, made to look Gothic from the outside, like icing decorations on a wedding cake.

The inside of Strawberry Hill followed the same idea. The ceilings and walls were filled with decorative, lightweight plaster details that weren’t functional. These were more like set pieces than parts of a real, load-bearing structure. Walpole was creating a fantasy environment where he could feel like he was living in the world of his own novel, complete with eerie monks and rattling chains.

During the 18th and 19th centuries, it became common for wealthy people in England to create artificial ruins and follies—fake castles, temples, and broken columns—in their gardens. These were meant to feel romantic or mysterious, even though they weren’t old or real. Strawberry Hill fit into that trend.

Later on, in the 19th century, a writer and thinker named John Ruskin became one of the major voices in the Gothic Revival movement. Ruskin was an aesthetician, someone who studied and wrote about art and beauty. He believed Gothic architecture had moral and spiritual value because it united decoration with structure—meaning that the beauty of the buildings came from their honest use of materials and engineering. He thought that medieval builders were more sincere and more religious, and he saw that time as more pure or noble.

Ruskin wanted modern architecture to return to that style, not just in appearance but in its values. He thought the elaborate details of Gothic churches weren’t just pretty—they also helped the building stand up. He also made some guesses that weren’t based on facts. For example, he claimed that Gothic arches came from the shapes of trees in a forest, with branches arching overhead like a canopy. But that’s not true. Gothic builders figured out their designs through a lot of experiments and changes over time, not by copying tree shapes. It just happens to look similar.

Walpole and Ruskin were connected in a loose way: one created a fantasy version of the Gothic past, and the other believed in bringing back what he thought was the true spirit of the Gothic period. Even though they had different reasons, both helped shape how later generations thought about medieval architecture.

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