Bohemian

Bohemian, 9x12 inches oil on canvas panel by Kenney Mencher
A portrait of a beautiful alternative young man in a bandana with long dark hair.

Portraits like this are one of my favorite things to paint. This goes all the way back to my childhood when I had a wonderful teacher in junior high school who invited me to stay late after school and he spent an hour and a half going over the proportions of the face and the individual features of the face.

This lesson was so inspiring that for years after that I spent a good part of my free time drawing interesting and beautiful faces out of magazines and photo books for years. When I got older, I learned the fundamentals of figure drawing and painting and I was able to grow expand my repertoire but faces are still a favorite subject for me. In this case, sometimes you just must do a kind of character study of an interesting face.

I'm a big fan of portrait painting in the vein of John Singer Sargent and Malcom Liepke. Often, I find pictures of characters on the web and make quick alla prima portraits of people with cool or interesting faces.

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.

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.

This painting is a standard frame size and painted on canvas panel.

Canvas panel is a sturdy rigid sheet of archival cardboard with a layer of canvas glued to it. Canvas board is a good choice for making art because it doesn't flex the way stretched canvas does and so thick layers of paint are less likely to crack as the painting ages. It's also easier and cheaper to frame. If you go to Amazon and search for an,

"9x12 inch open back frame"

You will see a list of easy to use do it yourself frame kits. Most under $20