Captain Ursine, 30x40 inches oil on stretched canvas by Kenney Mencher

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This 30 x 40” painting is on extra thick stretcher bars so you will not have to frame it.

This monumental painting is of a monumental bear. One of the things that I like to do is play around with identity, body positivity, and the formal aspects of painting such as composition color and texture.

I like to paint bears and older men in general who have thicker body types and a lot of body hair because that’s who I relate to the most and it also reflects my body type and even my level of hairiness. However, I’m not his muscular and powerful looking as this older male is. It kind of mission that I have with my painting is to help older man like myself accept their bodies and to promote body positivity.

In terms of the painting’s composition, one of the things that I like to do is to eliminate as much negative space as possible and to devote as much of the painting to filling up the composition or picture plane as I can. Another way that I do this is to have the figure touch or “kiss” the four edges of the canvas to make a sort of interesting spiral composition. This also aids a little bit in cropping out some of the things that would identify the model specifically such as the top part of his face. I wanted the viewer to identify with the model without necessarily identifying who the person is specifically.

Textures a big part of my painting and it’s one of the more abstract qualities. If you look closely at the painting you’ll see that the body is rendered mainly with brushes and thick impastos of paint. The term “impasto,” literally translates from the Italian as the word paste and it is an art historical term to describe thick layers of paint. I set off the brushwork of the body with thick troweled on paint in the background. The hair on the body has been accomplished with a series of coarser bristle brushes and also with matching some of the hairs into the thick paint on top.

Another element in this painting is the use of colors. There’s a theory in painting in which cool colors, colors like blue that are associated with water and green, recede from the viewer and that warm colors, such as warm oranges and browns ( those associated with fire and warm) push forward towards the viewer. I was playing with that theory in this painting.