Conserving Water, 24x36 inches oil on canvas panel by Kenney Mencher
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I was hoping to tell a story in this painting. In gay culture especially before the advent of the AIDS epidemic, bathhouse culture was an integral part of gay life. It’s slowly starting to make a comeback and one of the things that is also changing in terms of bathhouse culture is an approval and attention to body positivity especially in reference to older men and those who describe themselves as bears. Another part of this is even that there are so-called “bear chasers.” In this painting I was playing with the idea of both of those elements. The handsome jock wrapped in his towel and the older more powerful bear looking playfully out at the viewer.
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 an interesting composition.
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.
