Smoking Leather Man with a Leather Jacket, Cap, and Beard, 11x14 inches oil on canvas panel by Kenney Mencher

Smoking Leather Man with a Leather Jacket, Cap, and Beard, 11x14 inches oil on canvas panel by Kenney Mencher   

https://www.kenney-mencher.net/

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Leather as a gay subculture traces its roots back to the appearance of US biker gangs in the 1940s and 50s. Leathers were practical, but the rugged masculinity of biker culture imbued the material with an allure that spoke to men interested in men. Among gay men, leather was also a rejection of the tropes of effeminacy and passivity that homosexuality had accrued since the mid 19th century, a disavowal of the “sweater queens” – well-to-do, preppy gay men – of the time. “Leather was everything that the self-consciously effeminate homosexuals weren’t. They were some of the first gay men to reclaim masculinity,” says Eric Chaline, author and historian of gay sadomasochism.

This painting was done in the 'alla prima' method. The alla prima is an Italian phrase that means 'at first attempt'. It refers to a wet-on-wet approach whereby wet paint is applied to previous layers of still-wet paint, often in a single sitting. Over the years, the technique has been adopted and adapted by artists from Van Gogh to Velázquez.

In particular I try to approach painting in several ways, I want the drawing skills, color, and anatomy to be accurate but I also try to make the compositions more interesting by avoiding a “bull’s eye” (symmetrical) composition in favor of a more exciting slightly off center or “asymmetrical” composition.  I’m also attempting to work with brush work and thick and thin paint in a more stylized and calligraphic way.  I want the paint to be thickest where the light is the brightest and thinner in the darker areas.  The direction of the brush strokes is meant to follow and amplify the contours of the forms and make it feel more tangible.

The subject matter of most of my work is usually blatantly homoerotic or at the very least queer.  I’m trying to ally with other queer and gay creators in representing people who are often marginalized by the rest of the world and make art that speaks to a community that often is silenced.

A bit of stuff about me.

I was born in Brooklyn February of 1965.  During much of my childhood I lived in Brooklyn, the Bronx, upstate NY, Sarasota, Florida and Manhattan.  (Both my mother and father divorced and remarried.)  The real hero of my childhood is my older brother Marc who literally changed my diapers, acted as my protector and as my role model.

I started to learn to paint and draw when I was six or seven years old and was convinced that I would be an artist from that age on.

As a teen at the High School of Art and Design I got my best training in Irwin Greenberg’s class where he taught me how to draw, oil paint and watercolor. I also attended classes at the Cooper Union and Art Students League.      

My parents threw me out in my senior year of high school, so I earned my GED and worked construction on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.  It was a rough time but my older brother and his partner Kirk rescued me by inviting me to move with them to Cincinnati, Ohio to live and study.   While a college student, I worked in restaurants and painted as much as I could.   After a year at the University of Cincinnati, I went back to the Bronx where I finished college at CUNY Lehman.  Lehman is a fantastic college.

After completing my undergraduate studies, I lived in California and then Ohio completing my two masters’ degrees in Art History and Studio Art.  After school I was lucky enough to have dual careers as an exhibiting artist and tenured professor. 

In 2014 I began to work on paintings with a strong homoerotic content. Despite excellent sales and well received shows, the galleries I worked with wouldn’t show my new queer work, so I’ve been successfully working mainly directly with my collectors.  This change has freed me and allowed me to focus on themes and subjects that, in the past, were rejected or resulted in censorship.

Things are going great!  In 2016, after eighteen years of teaching art history and studio courses, I resigned a tenured professorship to pursue painting full time.