Travis, 12x16 inches oil on canvas panel by Kenney Mencher

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Another day another mohawk haircut. This stringy character reminded me of Travis from Taxi Driver. Or maybe Hawkeye from the Last of the Mohicans?

Portraits like this are one of my favorite things to paint. This goes all the way back to my childhood when I had a wonderful teacher in junior high school who invited me to stay late after school and he spent an hour and a half going over the proportions of the face and the individual features of the face. This lesson was so inspiring that for years after that I spent a good part of my free time drawing interesting and beautiful faces out of magazines and photo books for years.

This is one of a group of paintings that were worked on over the course of a week or two in a more layered approach. It began more as a rough sketch on the canvas panel that I worked out a little bit more with crayon and worked out the shading and environment using my imagination. Over the next couple of days the painting was developed more.

The next couple of days were spent working on an underpainting that began his thin washes of oil paint and ended up with thicker more opaque layers.

The finishing day that I worked on this painting I attempted to build up the surface is more and enhance the textures so that the paint textures matched a little bit more closely the physicality or textures of the figures and the environment they are in.