Diplomat's Son, 12x16 inches oil on canvas panel by Kenney Mencher

FREE SHIPPING Shipping takes 3-4 Weeks This ships from Round Lake Beach, Illinois. A suburb outside of Chicago. I use UPS and sometimes US Post.

This small painting is a subject that I’ve always loved even since I was a little boy, which is to paint interesting faces. One of the first things that I learned to paint and draw, even as a small boy of about seven or eight years old, where human faces. I started by doing profile points of view and then got some art books out from the library about how to draw the face from the frontal point of view and when I was in junior high school I had a teacher who spent some time after school sitting down and showing me how to draw all of the individual facial features.

After junior high school, I attended the High School of Art and Design, where I studied with Max Ginsberg and Irwin Greenberg both in the classroom and in a before school program that they had dubbed, “The Old Hat Painting Club.” Greeny and Max taught a method called alla prima painting.

What is alla prima painting? 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.

We would all chip in and pay another student to model for us, usually a quarter, which with 20 people in 1978, would have amounted to enough money to get a sandwich and a cup of coffee and we would paint from the life model.

I still love to paint one day studies of interesting faces and invent stories in my head about who that character might be. That’s why come up with the suggestive title of, the Diplomat’s Son.