NEW WORK AVAILABLE DIRECTLY
Pictures of men, age, and everyday life.
Self-Directed is a new group of paintings and drawings about private rooms, daily rituals, memory, and the experience of seeing oneself.
Open Studio · Sunday, November 1 · Noon–4 PM
Art Bias · 1700 Industrial Road, San Carlos, CA 94070
Sunday 12-25 AM (Kitchen), 48x36×1.5 inches oil on linen, by Kenney Mencher $3,000
Selected Works from Self Directed
Thursday 10 AM (Laundry Room, London)
36 × 48 × 1.5 inches, oil on linen
I spent much of the year traveling through Europe, looking at paintings I had been teaching about for more than thirty years. I had a lot of expectations about that trip. Some of the art moved me in ways I hadn’t expected. There were also unfamiliar rooms, ordinary chores, and stretches of time when I wasn’t quite sure where I belonged. You still have to wash your clothes.
I’ve been thinking about laundry rooms and hotel rooms as liminal spaces. Places you occupy temporarily, somewhere between one thing and another. In this painting, the figure settles onto a yellow bench while the laundry runs. His body is in the room, but his attention is on his phone. There’s the place he physically occupies and another place he’s participating in through the screen. I’m interested in that experience of being in two places at once.
These ideas have become part of Self Directed. Aging is a universal process, although each of us experiences it differently. Coming to terms with it is an ongoing part of my thinking and the development of my iconography, the figures, gestures, objects, and spaces that keep turning up in my paintings. I’m using situations from my own life to think about our bodies, our place in the world, and how we spend our time. Getting older has also given me more freedom to decide what I want to paint.
The color takes a lot of preparation. I premix colors and work out formulas to help me get past color constancy, our tendency to see the familiar color of an object despite changes in light and surroundings. A white washing machine contains a lot of other colors. I’m working out how those grays, blues, and reflected yellows relate to one another. The cool machines and clothing sit against the warmth of the walls and bench. Their repeated circles and rectangles give me a structure for the long diagonal of the body.
I vary the surface as I work. Some passages have paint troweled on thickly. Others are thinner, and I leave parts of the underdrawing showing through. Those differences create variation and let you see something of how the painting developed. I want the decisions, the drawing, and the physical handling of the paint to remain visible in the finished work.
This is an original oil painting on linen, 36 × 48 inches. The linen supports both the thinner passages and the heavier buildup of paint. It can be displayed without a frame.
Thursday 8:22 AM
40 × 30 x1 1.5 inches, oil on canvas
In this painting I’m sitting on the edge of a bed in shorts and gray socks. There’s an empty chair beside me and a pair of boots on the floor. The room has familiar, ordinary things in it, a radiator, a window, the building across the way. I’m interested in how those things become part of our understanding of the person sitting there.
I think of this as an exercise in empathy and framing identity. I’m using my own body and domestic spaces to examine the experience of middle-aged and older men. Aging is something we all participate in, and coming to terms with it has become part of how I develop the imagery in Self Directed. The seated posture, the socks, the empty chair, and the shoes give me ways to think about presence, absence, and self-observation. There’s room for someone else in the picture, even though we only see one person.
I worked out the composition in a preliminary drawing and made a separate study of my head. Some elements changed as I developed the painting. The lace-up sneakers in the drawing became red-brown ankle boots. Their color adds another warm area near the bottom of the canvas, and their shape gives them a different physical presence. The building outside the window became more specific too. The drawings gave me a place to begin, with decisions still to make as I painted.
A lot of the underdrawing remains visible in the finished painting. You can follow it through the bedding, the floor, and parts of the room. Some areas are developed with more opaque, substantial paint, while others remain thin enough for the drawing to continue doing much of the work. I like that variation. The figure, the radiator, and the bright window have a different surface from the more open passages around them. You can see something of how the image was built.
The warm walls, wooden floor, and pinks of the skin sit against the cooler socks, shorts, and light outside. These relationships help hold the room together without giving every part the same degree of finish. I’m trying to pay closer attention to ordinary spaces and routines, and to what they tell me about where I am in my life.
Sunday 12:25 AM (Kitchen)
48 × 36 × 1.5 inches, oil on linen
In this painting I’m sitting at a kitchen table after midnight, with a takeout container, a bottle, and three empty chairs. My body is part of an ordinary situation. I’m looking toward the viewer, so there’s also the possibility of someone else being there, on the other side of the table. The room is private, but we’re looking into it.
I’ve been thinking about how aging becomes visible through everyday habits and the spaces we occupy. Eating alone late at night is a small event, but it brings together questions about solitude, time passing, and how we take care of ourselves. The takeout has some ambivalence for me. There’s convenience and comfort in it, and also the possibility of carelessness or letting things slide. I wanted that uncertainty to remain in the picture.
Aging is a universal process. Coming to terms with it has become an integral part of how I develop the imagery in Self Directed. I’m using my own body because it’s the body I know and live in. The empty chairs, the food, the dark window, and the familiar furniture give that body a context. They let me work with feelings that would be harder to get at through the figure alone. A kitchen can feel comfortable and a little melancholy at the same time.
I constructed and adjusted the scene as I developed the painting, working with photographs of myself and changing the lighting. The intense yellow-orange room and red table are important to its emotional character. The blue-gray chairs and the pale takeout container interrupt that warmth. The dark window closes off the space beyond the kitchen, while the hanging light concentrates our attention inside it.
It started with a preliminary drawing in crayon on toned paper with black and white crayon. The painting began the same way, with a crayon on drawing. Then I put an imprimatura of burnt sienna paint and wiped down the highlights, strengthening the drawing with burnt sienna as part of the under painting. As I worked on it, I realized that I wanted a vareity of ways of handling the textures and rendering. I left some layers just the drawing then I opaque layers of color over some areas and with the chairs and table I literally troweled paint over surfaces to create thick impastos.
The painting also grew through decisions about how much to finish. I worked more fully into the figure, the chairs, and some of the objects, while leaving other passages more open. There are thick, opaque strokes alongside thinner areas where the earlier warm paint remains visible. The chrome edges, flesh, walls, and floor each gave me different surfaces to work with. I wanted that variation to remain, so you can see some of the painting’s construction as you look at the room.
This is an original oil painting on linen, measuring 48 × 36 inches and 1.5 inches deep.
Project
I am developing a new body of paintings about men, aging, private rooms, classrooms, mirrors, memory, and the social codes that shape how people look at art and at each other. The work grows out of drawing, photography, art history, travel, and years of painting the figure.
About
Kenney Mencher is a figurative painter and art historian. His work grows out of long training in drawing, painting, and looking at pictures. He has taught art history and studio art for many years, and his paintings have been exhibited in galleries and museums across the United States.
CV/Exhibitions
Selected Solo and Two-Person Exhibitions
It’s All About the Bears, Lone Star Saloon, San Francisco, California, 2022
Renovated Reputations, Ohlone College, Fremont, California, 2012
Renovated Reputations, Elliott Fouts Gallery, Sacramento, California, 2012
Renovated Reputations, Art Museum of Los Gatos, Los Gatos, California, 2012
Lovers and Liars, Varnish Fine Art, San Francisco, California, 2008