I'm Kenney Mencher. I'm an artist who left a tenured professorship in 2016 to pursue making art full time. This blog is about art, art history, with a emphasis on human rights. I make homoerotic art featuring bears, otters & other gay wildlife.
Friday
Tuesday
Size Counts or My Little Pony
Notice how big (or small) these horses are compared to the people with them. Discuss?
Monday
Some drawings I did in the last week while on spring break.
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| After a photo by Lewis Hine |
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| After a photo by Lewis Hine |
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| Figure Study |
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| Figure Study |
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| Figure Study |
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| Figure Study |
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| Figure Study |
Saturday
A portrait is a likeness in which there's something wrong with the mouth.
In an attempt to avoid this kind of conundrum, I've decided to do a bunch of studies as a "rehearsal" for this portrait commission. I cant believe how much this is helping that I've done this! Here's what I have so far done: 
Thursday
Did the photographers who worked for the WPA exploit the subjects they were trying to help?
Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange were both photographers who were sent out during the Great Depression to document the poverty of that migrant farm workers and other lower income disenfranchised Americans were suffering from
It would seem that there photographs were a social document that recorded as well as created a sympathetic point of view of these people's demise. However, Stefanie Däne in her Source Based Project: “FSA Photography: Dorothea Lange &Walker Evans” from 2010 has suggested that these people ... they were actually exploited by the government as a form of propaganda. ... In order to the promote the advantages of family farming, the photographers were ... codes or present other taboo subjects such as child labour.30 Whereas there are ... by the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA),
I wonder if they were. What do you think?
Right now at the Cantor Center for the Arts there is a wonderful show of Walker Evans Photographs.
Walker Evans
Walker Evans Photographs from Private Collection on View at Cantor Arts Center
February 1 – April 8, 2012
Stanford, Calif. – American photographer Walker Evans
(1903–1975), with his direct and unsentimental images of life on
small-town streets, in New York subways, and on sharecroppers’ porches,
inspired generations of photographers and helped shape contemporary art.
The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University presents a broad survey
of Evans’ 50-year career, drawn entirely from the collection of
Elizabeth and Robert J. Fisher, MBA ’80. The exhibition, entitled
“Walker Evans,” opens Feb. 1 and continues through April 8, 2012. This exhibition encompasses not only Evans’ brilliant documentation of the Great Depression and his work with James Agee on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the landmark study of three tenant farm families in Alabama published in 1941, but also his little-known experimental photographs from 1928 to 1930; the subway series (1938–41) later published in the monograph Many Are Called; photo-essays for Fortune magazine (1945–65); and rare Polaroid SX-70 prints from his final years. The exhibition includes more than 125 vintage prints as well as an extensive selection of Evans’ original books and magazines. The progenitor of the documentary tradition in American photography, Evans had the extraordinary ability to see the present as if it were already the past, and to translate that knowledge and historically inflected vision into an enduring art.
Presentation of “Walker Evans” is made possible by the Center’s Clumeck Fund and Cantor Arts Center Members.
# # #
VISITOR INFORMATION: Cantor Arts Center is
open Wednesday – Sunday, 11 am - 5 pm, Thursday until 8 pm. Admission is
free. The Center is located on the Stanford campus, off Palm Drive at
Museum Way. Parking is free after 4 pm weekdays and all day on weekends.
Information: 650-723-4177, museum.stanford.edu.PUBLICITY PHOTOS: For high-resolution images, contact PR Assistant Manager, Margaret Whitehorn: 650-724-3600, mmwhite@stanford.edu
View related programs.
Walker Evans, Alabama Tenant Farmer, 1936. Gelatin silver print. Lent by Elizabeth and Robert J. Fisher, MBA ’80. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Walker Evans, Main Street, Saratoga Springs,
New York, 1931. Gelatin silver print. Lent by Elizabeth and Robert J. Fisher, MBA ’80.
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Walker Evans, Broadway, 1930. Gelatin silver print.
Lent by Elizabeth and Robert J. Fisher, MBA ’80.
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art _______________________________________________________
Wednesday
Rembrandt, Self Portraits and Me
Self-Portrait with Shaded Eyes, 1634. Rembrandt van Rijn (Dutch, 1606–1669). Oil on wood; 70.8 x 55.2 cm. Private collection, New York
The exhibition Rembrandt in America will be at The Cleveland Museum of Art through May 28, 2012, It is a rare opportunity to see many of the Rembrandt pieces that reside in American collections, all in one venue.
The exhibition Rembrandt in America will be at The Cleveland Museum of Art through May 28, 2012, It is a rare opportunity to see many of the Rembrandt pieces that reside in American collections, all in one venue.
This exhibition and my own art history class made me think about the tradition of self portraiture. One of the wonderful things about Rembrandt's self portraits are an insight into his biography in which he goes from hedonistic libertine.
To middle age.
To financial ruin and his life on the margins of society.
Alright, I'm no Rembrandt but I did do a series of self portraits and maybe my self portraits give a little insight into me. At least they helped me to learn something about painting!
Similar blog posts about technique and the use and misuse of art history:
- Rembrandt and His Wash Drawings
- Rembrandt, Self Portraits and Me
- Rembrandt, Matisse and Me
- Henri Matisse and Me
- Marcel Duchamp, Rrose Selavy, Mona Lisa, and Me
- Giacomo Balla and Me
- John Singer Sargent, Caravaggio and Me
- Velasquez and Cherise
- N.C. Wyeth, Chuck and Me
- Me and Hopper: A Certain Slant of Light
- My Use and Abuse of Photo Reference
- Themes in Art; Sequential Art
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