Could you tell us about your history as an artist?

It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do ever since I could hold a crayon.  As a small child, probably starting at the age of six or so, I remember drawing fired off every pleasurable sensation in my body and brain I could think of.  My parents had a bunch of art books and even an old Gardner’s “Art Through the Ages Textbook” from the 50s when they were in college and I could get enough of the pictures.  They bought me “How To” books on art and my grandparents also would buy me art supplies.  When I was eight years old I learned how to draw profiles by copying a drawing of Hans Christian Anderson from a Scholastic book. I drew profiles obsessively in the dirt with a stick outside my school.  That same year, I painted a series of portraits of the presidents with model paints.  Painting people and especially faces is one of the most pleasurable things I’ve ever set my mind to.

Ohio 1977, in junior high school I had a teacher, Mr. Mallen, who stayed after school for two hours and taught me the fundamentals of drawing features.  I’m still friends with his son on Facebook.  This was an information explosion for me!  I expanded on this and eventually moved back to the Bronx with my father’s new family where I tested into the magnate school the High School of Art and Design.  That’s where I got to the next level and met a teacher Irwin Greenberg “Greeny” who I think about every day.

Greenberg conducted an extra open studio time before school began that he called "The Old Hat Painting Club." We would get to school about two or three hours early and one of us would model for the rest of the students who would begin painting a wet into wet or "ala prima" painting of either the full figure, head, and shoulders, or just the face of a single person. We would all dig into our pockets and contribute a quarter or $.50 to pay the model. This was way back in 1979 so that could amount to going out for sandwich or a meal.

Greenberg taught us a quick 19th-century style that is often referred to as wet into wet or sometimes ala prima. What this means is we with telling the canvas with some turpentine and a little bit of burnt sienna paint and then start drawing into this soupy mix with the darker brown, usually burnt umber, and draw with the brush. We would immediately start to model the shading or value structure as we painted and we would sometimes wipe out the lighter areas to be able to see the value structure or structure of light and shadow as it moved across the figure or face. You must work very quickly and sometimes you only had two or three two-hour sessions to complete the painting and our teachers were so skillful that they were able to make a completed portrait, in the style of John Singer Sargent, sometimes in as little as an hour. It was a kind of magic and we strove to learn how to do that. Now at the ripe old age of 57 I'm able to paint beautiful young people and sometimes older handsome men in anywhere between 2 to 5 hours. In the style of my teachers.

How did you specifically become an “erotic” artist?

There’s an excitement in being transgressive and depicting or illustrating things that either excite or annoy other people.  Especially when it comes to sex and power.  There are some fancy theories about this proposed by author Michel Foucault in his “History of Sexuality.”  I was introduced to this text and the ideas in it in graduate school but I think it explains rather than created the impulse for me to create sexually or erotically charged images. To put it bluntly, I’ve always been excited by depicting taboo things such as sex, sexual power, and sexual identity. 

I started depicting taboo or difficult subjects in high school and have continued to do so throughout my entire career.  For my graduate thesis exhibit my show consisted of a series of loosely expressionistically painted male figures having sex in the style of the Bay Area figurative painters, Diebenkorn and Bischoff while every other painting in the exhibit was a series of fairly tightly painted still lifes of fruits and vegetables against drapery.  I was thinking memento mori my graduate advisors didn’t know what to make of it.  This was at the University of Cincinnati a couple of years after the Mapplethorpe exhibit.  I remember one of the comments left in the guest book was something like, “This isn’t a retrospective, make up your mind about what you’re going to paint.”

Later, I made similar transgressive or erotically charged images while I was working with a gallery called “Hang” in San Francisco.  Surprisingly enough, “Hang” wasn’t that interested in the edgy imagery and even stopped representing me because they were offended by what I was painting.  This despite a great sales record. 

See this for the articles and reviews about my work that describe what happened,

http://kenney-mencher.com/catalog/article.htm

For example, when I presented this painting called “Los Angeles” oil on canvas 36x36 inches to Hang, they immediately clutched their pearls and refused to take the painting.  When I left the gallery and had a solo show at Klaudia Marr Gallery in Santa Fe it sold immediately.  So did the rest of the paintings that were too challenging.

After all the press I got about my shows in the Sacramento Bee and the Oakland Tribune, I was picked up by another gallery I Sacramento called the Elliott Fouts Gallery but even that gallery, but even Fouts had problems with anything homoerotic or gay in subject matter.  Now I mainly represent myself, however, I still get marginalized by the galleries who have asked to show my work.  For example, Bearworld just ran a feature about my work where I describe how this is still going on.

https://bearworldmag.com/galleries-gay-male-art-bear-bodies/

However, he still suffered from a bit of censorship, he’s also had his work removed from several galleries and most recently been told that his work is “too gay” for a gallery in Palm Springs.  The director explained that they would take some of the paintings however, the titles were also “too gay” and would have to be sanitized.  By the way, the gallery director is gay. 

What is it about the male form that inspires your work?

Although I have empathy for all bodies a sort of “I Sing the Body Electric,” I don’t mean to get too esoteric, I relate to the male body in a way that I cannot to the female body, politically, historically, and psychologically. 

The easy answer is comic books and classical art.  The male body is the heroic powerful body.  Male beauty is not decided by how smoothly airbrushed out and homogenized it is the way that womens’ bodies have been portrayed.  Male bodies are allowed to have character and are still considered beautiful.

I like to paint men who I have either looked like, wanted to look like, or look like now.  In some ways, every male I paint is a type of self portrait of an aspect of how I feel or have felt.  I understand the anatomy of the male body, the fat and the muscle, the hard and the soft and so I am inspired to get this down in paint or draw it. 

I mainly paint men because it helps me to accept and understand who I am and why I’m a vibrant sexual and powerful creature.  I’ve always painted men, especially homoerotic portraits of men, but galleries simply would not show the work.  When the availability of an online market became available, I was able to make the leap and paint the subject that inspires me the most without a gallery arbitrarily deciding what they would show.

What makes a “beautiful” man?

That’s such a reductive question!  I think that I find a man beautiful if he has something distinctive about his appearance and this ranges from body types to facial types and is for me literally on a case by case basis.  I prefer larger, hairier men.  I guess either muscle bears or soft fat bears.  I like it when a man has a big nose and distinctive features.  There is usually one particular aspect of a male figure that can dominate for me whether or not they are beautiful, for example, if a man has a beautifully shaped skull, or nose, cheekbones, large arms, or big yummy tummy.

Who are some real life models/performers you have or would be interested in painting? Why?

I’ve painted several influencers and people who are celebrated like Gainerbull https://twitter.com/gainerbull and ready_w_red https://www.instagram.com/ready_w_red/

I was sitting in the movie theater watching the first Henry Cavill Superman movie when his face came on the screen.  I gasped and leaned over to my wife and said, “He is the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.”  I felt the same way when I was Daniel Craig the first time.  However, I’m not really sure if I would want to paint them consistently.  My eye wanders a lot!  I’m not really interested in one kind of male type to paint, I guess I’m polygamous when it comes to models.  There are a couple of bulls that I’ve come across in some porn that I’ve done screen grabs of and those paintings have sold immediately and they are the types of guys I like to paint more often although I don’t know their names.

If it’s not too personal, you are married to a woman, how does your attraction to the male form tie into this?

 Well, I know my wife is attracted to the same men I like to paint.  She is a really open minded person who like me, is kind of “gender queer.”  Neither one of us has a problem acknowledging that human sexuality is on a spectrum and one doesn’t need to limit yourself in terms of attractions.  She gets asked about it all the time and people ask her if she has a problem with what I paint, she often likes to respond, “I wish that when I got home from work Kenney had one of his delicious models sitting on the couch for me to stare at.”  Unfortunately, I work from photos.  She does like to look over my shoulder when I’m downloading reference materials from the web.

How can one view and purchase your art?

I sell mainly on the web, galleries are a tough sell!  I post stuff regularly on Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr, often collectors get in touch with me directly.  I also have most of my available stuff on the following sites and platforms:

 ·       https://www.kenney-mencher.net/

·       http://www.kenney-mencher.com/

·       http://www.etsy.com/shop/kmencher

·       https://www.instagram.com/kenneymencher/

·       https://www.facebook.com/Kenney.Mencher

·       http://www.youtube.com/user/kmencher

 What are your plans with your artwork in the future?

 I’ve started working on paintings with more than one figure.  I like to make smaller version to see how it will go and then make a more monumental one. These multiple figure paintings have been popular and I feel like it’s somehow my chance to grow and improve my art into a more conceptual way.  Although most of my work is about the beauty of the male figure painted as skillfully as I can, the anatomy, shading and textural qualities of the paint, I feel like I’m growing in terms of the subject matter by including more narrative or story telling elements in my art.  These new paintings are meant to be a bit of a “thematic apperception test” called by shrinks the TAT.  When I was in college, I learned about a psychological technique developed by American psychologist Murray at Harvard University during the 1930s. The idea for the TAT emerged from a question asked by one of Murray's undergraduate students who reported that when her son was ill, he spent the day making up stories about images in magazines and she asked Murray if pictures could be employed in a clinical setting to explore the underlying dynamics of personality.  I thought this would be a great point of departure for people looking at art.