Kenney Mencher

Sunday

I'm looking for a publisher or agent who works with picture books for adults.

I'm looking for an agent or publisher (or just some advice) to help me with this project. A whiff of Edward Hopper, a blast of Mickey Spillane, a rrowf of David Lynch, Renovated Reputations and Manufactured Memoirs is an illustrated anthology of short stories in which Griffin and Sabine collide with neo-noir fiction. This book has humor, sex, and a "whack a mole" story.

Renovated Reputations is the result of an internet blogging project in which paintings and assemblages based on vintage and antique vernacular photography are the inspiration for short fiction.

The blog, which gets between one hundred to two hundred and fifty visitors a day, is the nexus point. Each week between seven to ten authors from the U.S. and U.K. submitted short fiction of one thousand words or less compete to win an original work of art that is the basis for the story.

The stories and assemblages are then coupled with great graphic design and photo illustration to create an environment that compliment the two. The book is a collaborative joint between myself, an artist with a national reputation and proven track record. (I’m also a professor of Art and Art History at Ohlone College in Fremont where I also am the director of the Louie Meager Art Museum and the author of the text book Liaisons, Reading in Art, Philosophy and History. The authors are a dirty dozen or so such as author professor Mark Brosamer, pulp author Steven D. Rogers of PulpFest fame, Dreamworks animator/cartoonist Brian Newlin, columnist Gigi De Vault and others.

The impetus for this project is based in a solo show of paintings in I am having at ArtHaus Gallery in San Francisco in April 2011.

The show is called Renovated Reputations: Paintings and Fiction inspired by Vintage Portrait Photographs. If we work fast we can market the book in conjunction with the exhibit.

Each story is a unique standalone entity – combined in
one volume, they’ll kill ya!
Download
it as a PDF.
Sincerely (I mean it!)

Prof. Kenney Mencher
Department of Art and Art History
Director Louie Meager Art Gallery Ohlone College, 43600 Mission Blvd.
Fremont, California 94539
Phone: (510) 979-7916 http://www.kenney-mencher.com/
http://kenney-mencher.blogspot.com/

Click on images to enlarge them

Here are sample pages from the book:

These
are some of the paintings the stories are based on.

Isabelle Ringing 20"x16" oil and mixed media on masonite panel

Betty Million
11"x14" oil and mixed media on masonite

(wishbones, bookpages, ephemera)

Chastity Beldt
10"x8" oil and mixed
media on masonite

Wednesday

Demonstration: How to Draw a Cube in Charcoal

This is a tutorial for my drawing and painting students at Ohlone College. (But feel free to use it if you like.)

The sphere is the basis for a lot of shapes that you will have to draw and paint. I have a PDF that you can download of the basic shapes to print out and draw here.

http://www.kenney-mencher.com/basic_shapes_press_high_quality.pdf

I start by using a charcoal pencil and I'm holding the pencil the way Humphrey Bogart in those old movies holds his cigarette.

I start by very lightly sketching a diamond shape. Then I take a compressed charcoal stick and use the side of it to draw the verticals. I'm holding it "Bogart" style and I use the longest edge almost like an ice skate to make the vertical lines that drop down from each corner.

Same use of the compressed charcoal stick to create the diagonal lines. Keep everything as light as possible! You want the lines to disappear as you shade in the planes.

Indicate in the background of the table.

The cast shadow is laid out as a horizontal line that starts from the where the corners meet the table top. One of the corners is hidden behind the body of the cube. The shape of the cast shadow looks a bit like a house that's been put sideways.

Now for the moment of truth! I drew everything freehand so if I put a T square against the paper are my vertical lines really vertical?

Nope! They are not straight up and down so I need to fix that.

All better now. Next I take the piece of compressed charcoal and use it kind of like a big paint brush to mass in the largest shadows and planes.

This is a compressed charcoal stick. This is a quick way to fill in the values so that it will make the drawing happen faster. My teacher Irwin Greenberg use to say that "Big painters use a big brush." I think that the same applies to drawing materials.

It's really important to work background to foreground.

Next comes the cast shadow.

Using the eraser to clean edges and also to smudge and blend.

Applying a tone for the tabletop. I guess I really should have done this earlier.

Using a stump to blend and even the tones.

Using a charcoal pencil to make small hatches and define and modulate the values.

I think that mark making is an important part of drawing. I'm using light lines that are parallel to the sides of the cubes to even the tones and create some texture.

At this point this drawing is a finished version that uses mark making. It's important to think about the direction and frequency of marks. Some artists do not like mark making at all and so they completely blend the tones.

Next, I'll show you how to do this towards the end. Here I use the eraser to start doing this and to straighten things out. At this point I'm kind of just playing around to make it different.