Memorial Day, 16x20 inches oil on canvas panel by Kenney Mencher

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The famous painter Edward Hopper often named his paintings after times of day or even days of the week. That’s what gave me the idea to name this painting Memorial Day. It’s one of those holidays where it’s still possible to get naked at the beach. I also wanted to tell a little bit more of a story with the title and also with the cropping of the image.

I think that you can tell that this person is at the beach but you can’t really tell what kind of beach, or who this person is, their almost anonymous in the way that I crop the face and the hands. Sort of like Batman’s mask. You only get to see the bottom half of the face and of his chiseled jaw line. His muscular physique is also a big part of the excitement or charge of the image as well as the mystery of who he is.

The paint on this is super thick and it took several days to make the painting. Recently I moved from California, where I had a pretty cramped small studio, to a larger house where I’ve taken the entire basement as my painting studio. This is allowed me to experiment and try out new things that I have never been able to do because I have a lot more space and places for things to dry and services to work on. I can work on paintings over several days or weeks rather than have to rush through them and work on only one painting at a time.

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. Some of the paint is almost 2 to 3 cm thick and applied with plastering knives and thick bristle brushes which I think gives the surface and almost skin like quality.