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.
Sunday
Can fine art still change society?
I’m an currently studying art and hope to make a living from it someday. Naively, I’m very interested in protest art and it's ability to change the world. I know this was done in the past but was wondering if, in the present era, it is still possible for an artwork to spark real societal change.
I know that your art history professors want you to believe that art was used to create social change. Maybe in some instances it wasn’t the spark that created the social change but helped it along. For example, when Jacques Louis David painted his Oath of the Horatii, it was at first thought of very kindly and accepted by the aristocracy and by the King himself. However, David’s painting is taught as a sort of icon of political change. I think that historians either through lack of facts or by a forcing a thesis have taught that David’s paintings were the cause of change rather than being a document that expressed.
Another instance where it’s been taught that fine art created social and political change is in the work of Honoré Daumier. In fact I think you might even been jailed at one point for making some cartoons of the Emperor. He certainly was censored. However, I think that David and Daumier were both recording and expressing ideas that had already been floating around at the time.
FlashForward to the 20th century and think about the WPA artists such as Thomas Hart Benton and Dorothea Lange. Art historians are very fond of saying that they were causing social change but if you think about it they not so much caused it as recorded it.
Today, we have artists like Banksy, who do comment on society and have even gone to the Middle East and created art installations but I don’t think that they’re changing anybody’s minds.
The bottom line, and I guess my main thesis in answering your question, is that art is often created as an expression of ideas that people already agree with. The art that is sold and even studied in art history classes are often taken up for political reasons by the people who support the causes. I don’t really think that they create the social change as much as express it. Of course you can probably fine art historians to disagree with me and that’s fine I just can’t think of a single example where work of art actually created social change, even in the posters that were in favor of Obama.
Saturday
What is the most famous painting of Hell?
BOSCH, Hieronymus.
Garden of Earthly Delights
(right hand panel of the triptych) c. 1500
Oil on panel, 220 x 195 cm
Museo del Prado, Madrid
The dreamlike paradise of the center panel gives way to the nightmare of Hell in which the excitement of passion is transformed into a frenzy of suffering. Here the lushest paradise Bosch will ever produce leads to the most violent of his always violent hells. As is generally the case in Bosch's vision of Hell a burning city serves as a backdrop to the various activities carried out by Hell's citizens, but here the buildings don't merely burn, rather they explode with firey plumes blasting into the darkness as what appears to be a wave of refugees flee across a bridge toward an illuminated gate house.As is always the case in Bosch's Hells the general theme is a chaos in which normal relationships are turned upside down and everyday objects are turned into objects of torture. And, given Bosch's use of musical instruments as symbolic of lust it is not surprising that in the Hell musical instruments as objects of torment are prominently featured. From the left we see a nude figure which has been attached by devils to the neck of a lute, while another has been entangled in the strings of a harp and a third has been stuffed down the neck of a great horn. http://www.artdamage.com/bosch/g...
The picture shows a detail of The Hell. Several huge musical instruments figure prominently in Bosch's conception of hell. They are shaped similarly to the ones used at that time, but their positioning is unrealistic (for example, a harp grows out of a lute). Their relationship to each other bears strongly fanciful elements, and they have been adapted in form. What is more, the use of these instruments is wholly fantastic. There is a human figure stretched across the strings of a harp; another writhes around the neck of a flute, intertwined with a snake; a third peers out of a drum equipped with bird-like feet, the next one plays triangle while reaching out from a hurdy-gurdy, and even the smoking trumpet displays an outstretched human arm. It is difficult to conceive that the group of damned souls would sing a hymn from the musical score fixed to the reverse of the reclining figure in front of them - although this has been proposed by some scholars. The ensemble, lead by an infernal monster, could more likely be a parody.
According to Dr. Bruce Lamott, a music historian, the depiction of the individual crucified on the harp, the image of the trumpet shoved up the rear end of one of the figures, and the ears sliced by the knives could be a reference to the ideas that were being debated by the Council of Trent. Many individuals felt that music was too sensuous and the work of the devil and that the new traditions of playing music in Church was a mistake.
There are also some very Giottoesque elements in this painting. In the lower right hand of hell is an image of a pig dressed in a nun's habit which obviously is a jab at the greedy nature of the Catholic Church. It is very similar to Giotto's inclusion of the Bishop who is taking money for indulgences and pardoning people in hell.
Friday
Thomas Eakins and Drawing with the Brush.
Thomas Eakins is one of my favorite artists. He shares a lot in common with artists like Robert Henri, John Singer Sargent and Velasquez.
Here's a quote in which he discusses something that my teacher Greenburg suggested was really a great idea. It's about drawing with the brush.
The brush is more powerful and rapid tool in the point or stump. Very often, practically, before the student has had time to get his broadest masses of light and shade with either of these, he has forgotten what he is after. Charcoal would do better, but it is clumsy and rubs too easily for the students work. Still, the main thing that the brush secures is the instant grasp of the grand construction of a figure. There are no lines in nature as we find out long before Fortini exhibited his detestation of them: there are only form and color.
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How Eakins and drawing with the brush is used for a portrait.
is watching me so
Then I "sketched" out the face with burnt umber on the panel with a brush. I focused on the biggest dark masses.
I then began to wipe out most of the lights with a rag and redefined the darks and redrew in some areas with some more opaque oil paints.
The darkest areas are actually a mixture of lamp black (NOT ivory) alizarin crimson, scarlet and cadmium red medium paint. It's actually more of a purple black than straight dark. This mixes with the underpainting of burnt umber and makes some beautiful mixtures of tones.
Next I began mixing this stuff with cadmium orange to make the dark flesh tones.
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See the Galkyd on the left and the mix of orange and my black mixture to its right. I then painted in most of the larger dark masses with this modified orange.
Moving into the lighter areas I mix in white (soft mixing white by Winton) and create a series of flesh tones.
It's sort of a paint by numbers operation at this point where I work from dark to light but mass in the largest and most general tones with the largest brush I have. My teacher Irwin Greenberg used to say that "Big painters use a big brush."
Blend edges redefine tones, start working out smaller details.
Redefine the drawing using the mixture start working with a smaller brush (about 1/2")
Redefine details of face, brush in some cadmium red light to pink out the cheeks and nose.
The background is a modified payne's gray with some yellow ochre. My wife says it's green. I think it's gray.
The hat is burnt sienna.
Here's the finished painting.
Joy Anna de Lyte oil on masonite panel 10"x8" by Kenney Mencher based on a photobooth image
Thursday
Wednesday
University jobs in Design - Graphic Design/Illustration, Art - General, and other related areas
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Dear Colleague,
This month's issue of AcademicKeys' e-Flier for Fine Arts features 21 faculty openings, 12 senior administrative positions, and 0 post-doc opportunities and links to hundreds more positions in higher education.
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