Two Men in an Alley, 18x18x1.5 oil on stretched canvas by Kenney Mencher

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I’m obsessed with painting and trying to improve my art. This painting is part of a series of paintings where I’m trying to bring my paintings up a level in terms of the subject matter and the physical qualities of the painting itself.

the majority of my paintings are usually a single figure in a very limited environment. In this case, I thought it might be more interesting and tell more of a story if I had to figures in a setting that allowed one to tell more of a story. In this case, I chose the setting of an alley.

I tend to think of the figures in the painting as characters rather than just models. I tried to create a distinctive character for each one of the figures that I thought my audience could relate to. Are they a couple? What’s going on here? I wanted the viewer to wonder what they were talking about. I’m hoping that will make up a story.

This is one of a group of paintings that were worked on over the course of a week or two in a more layered approach. It began more as a rough sketch on the canvas panel that I worked out a little bit more with crayon and worked out the shading and environment using my imagination. Over the next couple of days the painting was developed more.

The next couple of days were spent working on an underpainting that began his thin washes of oil paint and ended up with thicker more opaque layers.

The finishing day that I worked on this painting I attempted to build up the surface is more and enhance the textures so that the paint textures matched a little bit more closely the physicality or textures of the figures and the environment they are in.