FREE SHIPPING Shipping takes 3–4 Weeks
This ships from Round Lake Beach, Illinois. A suburb outside of Chicago.
I use UPS and sometimes US Post.
This painting is called Late Night Picture Show and I made it around the same time as Stealing Time. It’s one of those pieces where everything came together—lighting, mood, and subject. It features my younger brother Neil, who was kind enough to model for me after a couple of beers and some encouragement. The whole setup was carefully staged, based on an idea I had after following a blog called Big Happy Funhouse by Ron Slattery. Ron collected old black-and-white photos, and I found these incredible vintage portraits of underlit faces—maybe from the ’50s or ’60s—and I couldn’t stop thinking about them.
I wanted to incorporate those images directly, so I built the painting around them. The framed portraits in the background match the lighting of the central figure. To make that work, I had to add a separate light in front of the vintage TV to get that underlit effect across the entire composition. I had Neil wear a white tank top to give it a retro, noir-like vibe. The couch, TV, and even the frames came from my own collection and studio props—including some old Bob Ross-style landscapes I swapped out with the black-and-white faces.
What I love about this painting is how photorealistic it came out. I really focused on making the lighting believable and the surfaces smooth. I started with acrylic underpainting to block in the main colors and then worked in oil over the top to refine the realism. This piece was about pushing my technical chops—getting everything proportionally accurate, rendering flesh tones, shadows, and even the wood grain of the coffee table with a kind of illusionistic clarity. I painted this very flat, with almost no texture, because I wanted it to read like a photo—no thick brushwork here, just tight control.
Thematically, it plays on cinematic loneliness, mid-century domesticity, and noir tropes. It’s a kind of humorous and dark little scene at once—a guy zoning out in front of the TV late at night, with ghostly faces on the wall watching him. There’s a reference in the title to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but also just to the idea of TV and escapism. This painting also speaks to my love of film and how it intersects with painting—both in lighting and narrative.
This is another piece from my Fresh Finds collection. I’ve been digging into my archive, pulling out work from different stages of my career to release it to collectors. These paintings have been sitting in storage for too long, and I figured now’s the time to let people see and own them. They’re a part of my legacy—evidence of where I was as a painter at that time, focusing on tight realism, storytelling, and experimenting with influences like Lucian Freud, Velázquez, Malcolm Liepke, and the Bay Area Figurative painters like Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn. This one feels especially personal—it’s my brother, and it’s probably one of the strongest pieces I made in that stretch.
Details
Title: Late Night Picture Show
Artist: Kenney Mencher
Year: 2007
Medium: Oil over acrylic on gallery-wrapped canvas
Size: 36 x 48 inches
Style: Photorealism with cinematic and narrative elements
Condition: Excellent
Frame: Unframed, gallery-wrapped edges (ready to hang)
Technique: Acrylic underpainting with tight oil layering, smooth photographic surface
Subject: Seated man in a living room lit by TV, surrounded by retro props and black-and-white portraits
FREE SHIPPING Shipping takes 3–4 Weeks
This ships from Round Lake Beach, Illinois. A suburb outside of Chicago.
I use UPS and sometimes US Post.
This painting is called Late Night Picture Show and I made it around the same time as Stealing Time. It’s one of those pieces where everything came together—lighting, mood, and subject. It features my younger brother Neil, who was kind enough to model for me after a couple of beers and some encouragement. The whole setup was carefully staged, based on an idea I had after following a blog called Big Happy Funhouse by Ron Slattery. Ron collected old black-and-white photos, and I found these incredible vintage portraits of underlit faces—maybe from the ’50s or ’60s—and I couldn’t stop thinking about them.
I wanted to incorporate those images directly, so I built the painting around them. The framed portraits in the background match the lighting of the central figure. To make that work, I had to add a separate light in front of the vintage TV to get that underlit effect across the entire composition. I had Neil wear a white tank top to give it a retro, noir-like vibe. The couch, TV, and even the frames came from my own collection and studio props—including some old Bob Ross-style landscapes I swapped out with the black-and-white faces.
What I love about this painting is how photorealistic it came out. I really focused on making the lighting believable and the surfaces smooth. I started with acrylic underpainting to block in the main colors and then worked in oil over the top to refine the realism. This piece was about pushing my technical chops—getting everything proportionally accurate, rendering flesh tones, shadows, and even the wood grain of the coffee table with a kind of illusionistic clarity. I painted this very flat, with almost no texture, because I wanted it to read like a photo—no thick brushwork here, just tight control.
Thematically, it plays on cinematic loneliness, mid-century domesticity, and noir tropes. It’s a kind of humorous and dark little scene at once—a guy zoning out in front of the TV late at night, with ghostly faces on the wall watching him. There’s a reference in the title to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but also just to the idea of TV and escapism. This painting also speaks to my love of film and how it intersects with painting—both in lighting and narrative.
This is another piece from my Fresh Finds collection. I’ve been digging into my archive, pulling out work from different stages of my career to release it to collectors. These paintings have been sitting in storage for too long, and I figured now’s the time to let people see and own them. They’re a part of my legacy—evidence of where I was as a painter at that time, focusing on tight realism, storytelling, and experimenting with influences like Lucian Freud, Velázquez, Malcolm Liepke, and the Bay Area Figurative painters like Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn. This one feels especially personal—it’s my brother, and it’s probably one of the strongest pieces I made in that stretch.
Details
Title: Late Night Picture Show
Artist: Kenney Mencher
Year: 2007
Medium: Oil over acrylic on gallery-wrapped canvas
Size: 36 x 48 inches
Style: Photorealism with cinematic and narrative elements
Condition: Excellent
Frame: Unframed, gallery-wrapped edges (ready to hang)
Technique: Acrylic underpainting with tight oil layering, smooth photographic surface
Subject: Seated man in a living room lit by TV, surrounded by retro props and black-and-white portraits
