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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Set of 4 Original Prints – 1994 Intaglio & Woodcut, Signed, Fresh Finds Collection by Kenney Mencher (Set #7) $175

 

This set of four original prints is from my 1994 graduate school series, now released as part of my Fresh Finds collection. These works—Greta’s, Rear Window, Back Room, and Avoidance—are all early experiments with narrative, character, and urban space that shaped the way I approach painting and storytelling.

At the time, I was working through themes of film noir and emotional tension in everyday moments. I’d been watching a lot of Hitchcock and reading Raymond Chandler. These prints use intaglio and aquatint processes (plus a reduction woodcut for Avoidance), so they involve multiple steps of biting and printing the plates by hand. Each one is an editioned print or artist’s proof pulled on high-quality paper, many with deckled edges. All of them are unframed and in very good condition.

These are realistic in terms of proportion and space, but also stylized—especially in the use of light and line. The faces are simplified and a bit geometric, which heightens the drama. Each figure is rendered naturally with clear anatomy, but exaggerated gestures or shadows add emotional weight. The compositions are asymmetrical and structured to guide the eye—usually using the rule of thirds with figures pushed toward one side of the frame, suggesting narrative tension or unresolved relationships.

In Greta’s, a woman stands with her back to us, looking out a window next to a glowing lamp—this kind of setup was a key part of my development, where mood and gesture had to carry the story. Rear Window uses two figures in separate spaces—one observing the other—highlighting themes of voyeurism and detachment. Back Room places four figures around a table in tight quarters under a single hanging light, like a bar or interrogation room, referencing noir lighting setups. And Avoidance, a reduction woodcut, shows two men in close quarters but turned away from each other, using bold, angular cuts and contrasting colors to push emotional distance.

These were all part of the groundwork for how I started building layered, cinematic narratives into my work. This batch also includes rare artist’s proofs, which are the test impressions I pulled while checking how the image printed before completing the edition. These are usually kept in the studio, so it’s rare for them to leave my flat files.

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19th C Technology and Architecture

 

During the mid-1800s, a lot of new technology and industrial changes were happening and the technology influenced art and architecture. One example is the invention of oil paint tubes. Before this, artists had to mix paint themselves, but now they could buy pre-mixed oil paints in metal tubes, which made painting easier and more portable. These tubes were originally designed by a toothpaste manufacturer in the U.S.  This advancement reduced the cost of paint but also allowed painters more freedom to paint plein air, out of doors without having the inconvenince of putting the oil paint in animal bladders (a technique used by Monet) or having to grind and mix paint on location.  Innovations in manufacturing sped things up, including te creation of buildings.

The Crystal Palace, designed by Sir Joseph Paxton, was built in 1851 to host the Great Exhibition, also known as the first World's Fair. The structure looked a lot like a giant greenhouse. It was about 450 feet long and was made using cast iron and glass. Most of the parts were prefabricated, which means they were made in a factory and then brought to the site to be assembled. The glass used in the building had become more affordable at the time, which made this kind of construction possible. The way the building was put together was similar to how trailers or cars are built today—parts made in one place and snapped together somewhere else.

This idea of interchangeable parts came from earlier innovations like Eli Whitney's cotton gin and his work on making standard-sized machine parts. That kind of thinking influenced how people started designing buildings too.

The Crystal Palace had some design features that were inspired by older styles. It had arches like Roman triumphal arches and included some elements that looked a bit Gothic. Even though the building was made using new technology, it still held onto older architectural ideas. At the time, people didn’t really think of it as “architecture.” Instead, they thought of it as more of a technical or engineering structure.

Inside, it was filled with exhibits—industrial machines, new inventions, and even items from around the world. It was kind of like a temporary museum focused on industry, science, and culture. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert organized the event to encourage people to learn about new technology and to develop what they called “good taste.” At the time, industrialization had made a lot of things widely available, including household decorations and fabrics. Some people started mixing lots of patterns and designs in their homes. The fair aimed to guide people to use design in a more restrained and organized way, according to Victorian values.

The Crystal Palace also included displays from different parts of the British Empire and beyond. They brought back items from places like New Zealand, New Guinea, and Africa and exhibited them as examples of global cultures. In the 19th century, it was common for people to collect unusual objects—like fossils, old coins, or artifacts from far-off places—and keep them in curio cabinets. These were often filled with objects seen as rare or exotic, like a mummy’s finger or ancient pottery. That interest in distant cultures tied into a trend called Orientalism, which involved a lot of curiosity about the people, products, and environments of places outside Europe.

The Crystal Palace showed how industrial design, global trade, and cultural displays came together in one place during the 1800s.

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1993 Workboots, 23x42 and a half inches. oil on gallery wrapped canvas, by Kenney Mencher

 

This is one of the first paintings I made after I moved to Cincinnati for grad school in the early 1990s. I was still figuring out my direction, and at the time I was really drawn to the Bay Area Figurative movement—especially artists like Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn. You can probably see some of that influence here in the abstracted shapes, the patchy brushwork, and the way the figure melts into light and shadow.

The model is Val who posed for me sitting next to a pair of black work boots that was a favorite. I thought they had a strong, butch energy that gave the scene a quiet intensity. The way Val’s slouched in the chair, turned away from the viewer, gives the whole piece a kind of introspective mood.

I stretched this canvas myself using redwood from the local lumber yard—back then I was obsessed with learning every part of the craft, from building my own stretcher bars to making my own gesso. I’d mix calcium carbonate (basically marble dust) into commercial gesso and then squeegee it into the canvas. If you look at the back of the painting, you can actually see places where the gesso pushed through the weave. There are even a couple of small oil spots that soaked through too. The surface is tough and has held up well for over 30 years.

It’s not a standard size (23 inches by 42.5 inches), which I chose deliberately because I wanted to play with proportion. That meant making everything myself, which also helped me save some money. The canvas is gallery wrapped and I painted the edges, so you don’t need to frame it—though I should mention there are a few minor scuffs on the edges.

This painting has hung in nearly every place I’ve lived for the past 35 years. It’s part of my “Fresh Finds” series, where I’m digging into my archive and releasing pieces that have been with me a long time. I’m doing this to share more of my story with collectors—these are personal works that are part of my history and legacy, and I think they deserve a chance to find new homes.

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Francis Bacon

Bacon borrowed heavily from art history, using it almost like a musician samples earlier songs. A lot of his paintings draw directly from earlier works. His series based on Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X mixes that classical structure with emotional chaos. When he paints screaming mouths, the influence of Munch’s The Scream is clear. In other works, he adds elements like hanging sides of beef, which echo Rembrandt’s painting The Slaughtered Ox. You could almost describe the mix as Velázquez plus Rembrandt plus Munch equals Bacon.

One of the unique aspects of his process was how he painted. He worked on the reverse side of the canvas—the raw, unprimed sid e—which absorbed the paint differently. Bacon called it “the wrong side.” It made the paint soak into the surface in unpredictable ways, giving the paintings a rough, unstable look. That technique added to the atmosphere of decay and emotional stress in his work.

Even though some critics were unsure about where Bacon fit in art movements like Surrealism, his work has a strong link to those ideas. He reworked earlier imagery with an intensity that focused on human suffering, distortion, and the instability of identity. His place in 20th-century art connects him not only to Surrealists but also to painters like Lucian Freud, who were also interested in the raw, often uncomfortable sides of being human.

Francis Bacon once explained that he started painting on the reverse side of the canvas simply because he ran out of prepared ones. Instead of stopping, he flipped a canvas over and worked on the raw, unprimed side. He liked how the oil paint soaked into the surface—it created a mark that felt both permanent and fragile. That experience stuck with him, and he kept painting that way.

But using the raw side of the canvas has caused problems over time. Most painters use gesso, a white primer, to seal the canvas and protect it from the oils in the paint. Without that barrier, oil paint reacts directly with the fibers of the fabric—usually cotton or linen—which causes it to break down. The paint soaks in, and the material starts to rot. That’s why many of Bacon’s paintings today are hard to preserve. Conservators struggle with how to stop the deterioration without changing the look of the original work.

Bacon was part of a broader movement in the early to mid-20th century where artists were testing the limits of materials. He didn’t follow traditional techniques. His use of color shows this clearly. Many of his colors seem to come straight from the tube—highly saturated and not blended much. This is very different from Impressionist painters, who usually worked with subtle relationships between warm and cool colors to create depth and light. Bacon didn’t aim for that kind of optical realism. His color choices were emotional and intense, more in line with German Expressionists like Edvard Munch or Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. These artists also used bright, flat color to express emotion instead of depict real-world scenes.

Bacon’s paint surface often shifts between thin washes and heavy areas of thick paint, known as impasto. But one of the more distinctive features of his work is how he combines smeared or distorted forms with sharp, geometric lines. In his Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, for example, Bacon uses long vertical smears to blur the face and robes. He surrounds the figure with angular, almost diagram-like lines—yellow arrows and shapes that seem to float around the throne. These lines suggest motion or energy. Some of them resemble perspective guides or technical drawings, which could reflect his early background in design and interior architecture.

These lines appear in other paintings too. They don’t follow traditional shading or depth systems; instead, they act almost like frames or containers that trap the figure inside the space of the painting. Sometimes they feel like cages or spotlights, heightening the sense of isolation.

Officer Flowers – 16x20” Gay Archetype Cop Drawing, Crayon & Watercolor on Tan Paper by Kenney Mencher

 

This piece is called Officer Flowers. It plays with the classic gay archetype of the “hot cop”—the man in uniform, strong jawline, squared shoulders, the whole fantasy package—but I didn’t want to just glorify authority. That’s why the background is all soft, patterned flowers, and why I signed it RESIST.

This isn’t just about desire—it’s also about contradiction. A uniform can mean safety or threat, depending on who you are. I was thinking about that tension while I drew this. The soft, decorative backdrop pushes against the severity of the blue uniform and badge. It’s an intentionally queer contrast.

I used crayon and watercolor on warm-toned paper to give the piece an almost vintage storybook look, like an old pulp illustration. The bold black line defines the form, while the washes of blue and yellow add a pop of classic color. I left the paper showing through in places to keep the texture open and breathable, like a sketchbook page that tells you exactly how it was made.

The guy’s expression walks a fine line—he’s not smiling, but there’s a curl to the lips. A kind of smirk. He knows he’s being looked at. It’s flirtation, but it’s guarded.

In terms of style, it has hints of Tom of Finland’s confident, exaggerated masculinity—but rougher, sketchier, and less polished. The loose brushwork and play with surface remind me of Diebenkorn’s early figure studies and even Sargent’s watercolors in how the light just barely defines form through gesture.

What might this mean to someone looking at it? Maybe it’s funny, or nostalgic, or a little sexy. Maybe it’s a reminder that even fantasy figures can carry complex realities—especially now, when we’re all thinking harder about power, identity, and representation.

It’s part of my larger body of work where I explore masculinity, queerness, and cultural symbols. This one happens to be in a blue uniform and surrounded by flowers.

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Harmony in Red (also called La Desserte)

Sometimes paintings have a life of their own and the story of who and how they were commissioned, and where they traveled adds something to a student’s understanding of why we study them.  Sometimes we imagine that a painting was instantly famous and placed as part of the art historical canon, and this may be true, but paintings often become famous because of who owned and who exhibits them today.

Henri Matisse painted Harmony in Red (also called La Desserte) in 1908 in Paris.  His shows with the Fauves a few years earlier put him on the map with important collectors who could make an artist’s career. This painting was originally commissioned by a Russian art collector named Sergei Shchukin, who had been buying modern French art and was one of Matisse’s main supporters. Shchukin had a large collection of Matisse’s paintings in his home in Moscow and even turned some of the rooms into small private galleries.

After the Russian Revolution in 1917, Shchukin’s collection was taken by the Soviet state. His house and all the artwork in it were turned into a public museum. Harmony in Red became part of that state-owned collection. Today, it’s in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. It was moved there along with other works from Shchukin’s collection when the Soviet government restructured how art was stored and displayed.

The painting’s monumental reputation is somewhat matched to its physical size.  It is around 180 by 200 centimeters, which is about 6 feet by 6.5 feet. Like the Green Stripe, it is a painting of an everyday scene, although this is less of a portrait, however, the real subject matter is a combination of color and this time pattern.

When Matisse first painted the scene, he called it Harmony in Blue, but he changed the whole background to red after it was done. It’s unclear why he changed it, but the version we know today is the red one. The painting shows a room with a woman setting a table. There’s a window or possibly a painting within the painting, and the entire surface is covered in a pattern that blends the wall and the table.

I have my own theory about this.  It’s possible that Harmony in Red by Henri Matisse is connected in some way to changes in fabric design and interior decoration that came with industrialization. By 1908, when Matisse painted it, mass production had already made patterned textiles more common and affordable. Factories could print designs on cloth quickly, and more people were using these fabrics in their homes—for tablecloths, curtains, and wallpaper.

Earlier artists like some of the Impressionists painted these new interior spaces, showing how patterns and decorations were becoming part of everyday life. This was also a time when leaders like Queen Victoria were encouraging people to use more “tasteful” patterns in their homes. At world’s fairs, like the ones where Joseph Paxton’s glass building was shown, countries displayed new industrial products, including fabric and furniture, and tried to set style trends

In Harmony in Red, Matisse fills almost the entire surface with one pattern that covers both the wall and the table. The shapes are decorative, like something you’d see on printed fabric. He flattens the space and uses the same pattern across different surfaces, which blurs the line between furniture and background. This kind of treatment might reflect how printed designs had become part of everyday visual life, especially in the home.

While there’s no clear proof that Matisse was directly thinking about industrial textile production, he was living in a time when patterns, color, and decoration were all changing because of it. Painters were seeing these changes and responding in different ways. Harmony in Red could be one way Matisse showed that shift—not by copying a factory product, but by using similar decorative ideas in a painting.

Some art historians have looked at the updated color in Harmony in Red—originally planned as Harmony in Blue—and suggested that Matisse changed it to red to create a stronger sense of unity and visual impact across the whole surface. The red background makes the patterns and objects blend together instead of standing apart. This shift away from naturalistic space toward something more decorative and flat was unusual at the time and showed how Matisse was thinking differently about what a painting could do.

The color doesn’t follow traditional rules of light or shading. Instead, it covers nearly the entire canvas in a flat, even red, with dark blue curving lines for the pattern. This makes the room seem less like a realistic space and more like a flat surface filled with decoration. Some art historians think Matisse was influenced by things like Islamic tilework, Japanese prints, or other non-Western art forms where flatness and pattern were important. These kinds of images were becoming more available in Europe in the late 1800s and early 1900s because of global trade and colonial expansion.

The interaction between the red color and the repeated pattern has also been described as a way of making the viewer more aware of the painting as a surface, rather than a window into a 3D space. This idea was different from most European painting up to that point, which usually tried to create depth and realism.

Art historians often consider Harmony in Red a groundbreaking work because it challenges those older traditions. It puts color and design at the center, not story or illusion. It also helped lay the groundwork for later art movements like Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting, which took these ideas even further. Matisse’s painting showed that you could use bold color and decoration in a serious, large-scale artwork—not just in crafts or design.

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Rough Trade Resister – 16x20” Semi Nude Drawing, Crayon & Pastel on Tan Paper by Kenney Mencher

 

This drawing is called Rough Trade Resister. It plays with another classic queer archetype—the tough guy, the working-class hunk, the man who looks like he might be trouble... and that’s the point. He’s got the beard, the cap, and the rough physicality that taps into a kind of raw masculinity that’s deeply coded in gay visual culture.

But look closer. The cap reads RESIST, and it’s signed with my name and the year. That’s not just branding—it’s part of the message. This figure might look like he's part of a power fantasy, but he’s also resisting the idea that queerness has to be tidy, sanitized, or made palatable.

I used black crayon and white pastel on warm tan paper to emphasize the texture of the body hair, the play of light on his chest and abs, and to carve out the form without fully finishing it. There’s something unfinished and raw about the whole thing—almost like a protest sketch that became erotic.

The facial features are mostly hidden in shadow under the brim of the cap, and that’s intentional too. It makes the body itself the focus, but also allows the viewer to project, to imagine, to take part in shaping the fantasy. That anonymity is part of what gives it its heat—and its universality.

Stylistically, it flirts with the boldness of Tom of Finland’s work, but strips away the polish. It’s more Bischoff than idealized comic book. The linework is fast, rough, and assertive—like something you’d scrawl in the margins of a notebook if you didn’t care who saw. The pastel highlights give it a graphic, almost chalky light that brings volume to the musculature without hiding the surface.

This drawing isn’t just sexy—it’s about claiming space. It challenges authority, even while echoing it. It asks who gets to look powerful, and how that power is coded, shared, or rejected.

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Les Fauves

 

Les Fauves were a group of painters working in France in the early 1900s. The name means “the wild beasts” in French. A critic first used it in 1905 because their work looked so different from traditional painting. These artists used bright, unnatural colors and simple shapes. They didn’t try to make their subjects look realistic. Instead, they used bold outlines and large brushstrokes.

Henri Matisse was one of the most well-known members of the group and this section will focus on him. Other artists included André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck. They often painted people, landscapes, or still lifes, but they used colors that didn’t match what you’d see in real life. For example, a tree might be painted blue, or a face might be green.

Many art historians say that Fauve painters like Matisse created scenes that showed joie de vivre, which means “joy of living.” But their main focus was actually on formal elements, especially color, pattern, and sometimes the texture or quality of the paint.

The Fauves first showed their work together in 1905 at the Salon d’Automne, an art show in Paris that featured new styles. Their section surprised and even upset many visitors because it looked so unusual. The group didn’t stay together for long. By around 1910, most of the artists had moved on to other styles.

Henri Matisse painted The Green Stripe in 1905, during a short but active period when he and a few other painters were experimenting with a new style that later got called Fauvism. The name came from a critic who described their work as looking like it was made by les fauves, or “wild beasts.” This painting was done in Paris, where Matisse was living at the time. The subject is his wife, Amélie, and the painting was probably made in their apartment studio.

Henri Matisse’s The Green Stripe (also known as Portrait of Madame Matisse) is currently housed at the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, Denmark. That’s the national gallery of Denmark, and it holds a large collection of European art, including important modernist works.

The painting ended up there because it was purchased by a Danish art collector named Christian Tetzen-Lund, who supported modern artists like Matisse and Picasso early on. He bought the painting directly from Matisse or through his art dealer in the early 1900s. Later, Tetzen-Lund’s collection became part of the museum’s holdings.

So, although Matisse painted it in Paris, it’s been in Denmark for most of the last century. The museum still displays it today as part of its 20th-century European art collection.

 It was first shown publicly in 1906 at the Salon des Indépendants, an exhibit in Paris that allowed artists to show work without being judged by a jury. It got a lot of attention because it didn’t look like portraits people were used to seeing.

This was a time when France was dealing with changes in society, especially in cities. The country had gone through the Dreyfus Affair, a big political scandal that divided the public and raised questions about justice and nationalism. Artists like Matisse weren’t directly painting about that, but the atmosphere made people more open to challenging old rules. At the same time, new trade routes and colonies were bringing in art from places like Africa and Asia, and this influenced how artists saw the world and made pictures.

Matisse didn’t have a lot of money then. He was still trying to get attention for his work, and not everyone liked it. He’d studied law first, then gave it up for art, which his father didn’t support. There’s a story that Matisse painted this portrait quickly, and that Amélie didn’t like how it turned out. But she supported his work and posed for him often anyway.

Henri Matisse’s The Green Stripe was painted using both oil and tempera on canvas. The painting measures about 15.9 by 12.5 inches. That’s not especially large—it’s around the size of a regular sheet of poster board cut in half.

Matisse applied oil paint, which dries slowly and allows for smoother blending, and tempera, which dries quickly and leaves flatter, more matte surfaces. Using both was a way to experiment with texture and drying time. The canvas was stretched and primed, likely with a layer of gesso, which is a standard preparation that helps the paint stick better.

The surface texture of The Green Stripe varies because of the mixed media. Some areas look built up with thick brushstrokes, while others seem flatter. It’s not polished or smooth like some oil portraits from earlier in the 1800s. Instead, you can see the brushwork clearly, and the paint doesn’t always stay inside the lines.

The palette is saturated, with strong hues. The green stripe that runs down the middle of the woman’s face is a medium, secondary green—green being a mix of blue and yellow. There are also areas of primary colors, like blue and red, and some oranges and pinks, which are tertiary hues. The color is non local and doesn’t follow the natural tones of skin, light, or shadow. For example, the shadows on the face are blue and purple, and the cheeks are orange. These colors were not blended smoothly but placed next to each other in blocks or flat shapes.

The style is stylized, a bit abstract and not naturalistic.  The color is unnaturalistic and the proportions are off, for example, the mouth is too far down into the chin. and the symmetry is interrupted by the green stripe. The patterned blouse almost predicts how Matisse will approach and combine color in his later paintings, It is simplified, with repeated shapes to show the fabric pattern, but not drawn in fine detail.

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Expressionism

This section talks about changes in the 1700s, 1800s, and early 1900s, especially the anxiety that came with modern life. Romantic and Symbolist painters explored some of th

ese ideas through supernatural subjects. Henry Fuseli, a Romantic painter, made a well-known painting where a woman is shown asleep, possibly under the effects of laudanum, a drug made from opium. She’s having what looks like a nightmare, where she feels like she can’t breathe. The painting includes a small creature sitting on her chest and a ghostly figure in the shadows. It’s a literal image of sleep paralysis, a condition where a person is awake but can’t move and often feels pressure on their chest.

In another painting, there’s a woman who appears to be asleep or turning her head, while spirits—possibly her ancestors—look on. The presence of these ghostly figures adds to the feeling that something spiritual or supernatural is happening.

Paul Gauguin, a Post-Impressionist, traveled to Tahiti in the 1890s. He left Europe during a time when many people were turning away from religion and traditional beliefs. Gauguin said he was looking for something more instinctive and spiritual. In some of his Tahitian paintings, figures appear surrounded by symbols of death or are being watched by shadowy figures. The presence of spirits in his work suggests a belief in the supernatural, not necessarily a fear of death, but more a sense of death being nearby. These themes are part of a long tradition in European art known as memento mori, which are reminders of death.

Both artists were working at a time when people were becoming more uneasy with changes in society—especially changes related to science, urban life, and new technology. These feelings show up in their art as isolation, supernatural imagery, and themes of death.

Here’s a quote from Edvard Munch: “For as long as I can remember, I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety, which I have tried to express in my art. Without anxiety and illness, I should have been like a ship without a rudder.” While that’s Munch talking about his own work, the painting we’re looking at is actually by Gustav Klimt. Klimt wasn’t as openly emotional or melancholic as Munch, but his paintings still deal with some of the same ideas—especially the tension between life and death.

In this painting, you can clearly see a division: on one side, there’s a figure with a skull-like face, representing death. On the other side, there’s a group of people—women, children—wrapped in colorful, patterned fabrics, which seem to flow together like a current. Klimt lived in Vienna around the turn of the 20th century, when the city was full of artistic and intellectual energy. Composers like Gustav Mahler were performing there, and the whole place was filled with cultural activity. But alongside all that creativity, Vienna was also experiencing the pressure of modernization—things like railroads, expanding cities, and new inventions were reshaping how people lived. These changes may have influenced Klimt’s paintings, just like they shaped the work of earlier artists like Munch and Fuseli.

In this painting, the idea of memento mori—a reminder of death—comes through in the way the figures are arranged. Death stands to one side, wrapped in a robe covered in small crosses. The way the robe is designed—with sharp angles and hard lines—feels very different from the curved shapes and soft forms in the rest of the painting. The other side is filled with sleeping or resting figures, often embracing, surrounded by flat, decorative patterns that resemble textiles.

At the time, factory-made fabrics were common, and mass production had changed how people dressed and decorated their homes. Klimt includes lots of these patterns in his work. Instead of creating a traditional, realistic space with shading and depth—chiaroscuro—he uses flat shapes and layered designs. The background looks almost like a diagram, with a cartoon-like quality.

The designs in the fabrics also seem to mark gender differences. Round, flowing shapes are often used for women, while the square or angular ones tend to go with men. There’s a lot going on here—ideas about gender, death, maybe religion, too. The figure of death even holds a kind of staff or candlestick, though it’s not totally clear what it is. The crosses on the robe might be linked to religion or ritual.

Klimt was working during a time when photography had already been around for decades. Artists were no longer expected to paint only what the eye could see. He had to find new ways to make his art meaningful. His work often combines themes of love, sex, death, and the passage of time.

One of his most famous paintings, The Kiss, brings these ideas together again. It’s been copied and referenced a lot over the years. In it, he continues exploring how patterns, color, and simplified forms can carry meaning in a world that was quickly changing.

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Important Stuff to help your community.

 IMPORTANT 
USC law students have started a hotline for people to call when they have an immigration-related court hearing but don't want to show up in person for fear of being arrested/detained by ICE outside the courthouse. The students will help people complete and submit a "Motion to Change Hearing Format," which can allow someone to have a remote/online hearing instead of in-person. 
hotline # is (888) 462-5211
They can help in English or Spanish"