I paint cars that won't leave me alone.
Not every car. Not on demand. A particular machine gets into my head and stays there until it is two metres wide and hanging on a wall. Each painting is a one-off. There are no prints, no editions, and no second versions.
A long time ago there was a wardrobe door covered in Porsches: the ones I could afford at the time, cut out of magazines and stuck up with tape. I had a dream, the way boys with posters do. It took a few decades, but I ended up owning every car on that door.
The painting never stopped. What I understood then and still believe now is that these machines are the great sculpture of our age. Some of them deserve to be witnessed slowly, in paint, by hand, at a scale that stops a room.
I paint three things. Cars that will not leave me alone. Faces, now and then, when a whole life is written in one and I want to try to read it out loud. And abstracts, when I am looking for words I do not have yet. Some of those words end up becoming books.
I ran my other businesses with my head. This runs on something older. The studio is the quietest room in my life, and I keep it that way.
Keny was named by my kids. Their ruling: Lee is the software one. Thirty years of it, an Oxford masters, two companies founded and sold, a writing app used by over a million people. Useful, they agreed, but he talks about AI at dinner and it makes you yawn. Keny is the fun one. So Keny got the brushes, and Lee was told to stop helping.
They were more right than they knew. After enough years of ticking boxes, the studio is where I remembered what the boxes were for. It is where I paint, and it is where I wrote ManOS and the books that came after it: the tools I wish someone had handed me sooner. Besides, say it out loud: "it's a Keny." It has a ring to it. Nobody has ever pointed at a wall and said that about software.
- 01 · Tell me the story. Email me about the car, with a photo or two. But mostly, tell me what I am really painting. What the car means to you and how it came into your life. Where the painting is going to hang, because the room changes everything: scale, light, mood, all of it. And what a great result looks like in your eyes, because I want to know what we are aiming at before I pick up a pencil.
- 02 · I decide whether it gets under my skin. I say yes to a handful of cars a year, and I say no kindly. If your car is one I can't put down, you'll know quickly.
- 03 · We talk. Concepts, scale, medium, setting. Some works are a metre square. Some take over an entire wall. The room tells us.
- 04 · I paint it. In my St Kilda studio, and I keep you across the work as it develops. Good paintings are not fast, and I will give you an honest timeline before we begin.
- 05 · I deliver it personally. Anywhere in Australia. Partly to see it hung right. Mostly because I like meeting the people who end up living with these paintings. More than a few of them have stayed in my life, and that is the best part of the whole thing. You are also welcome at the studio.
Commissions begin at $7,500, which is typically a work around a metre square. Larger works, and murals, are quoted on scope.
Every painting is a one-off original, signed Keny. No prints, no reproductions, not at any price. I never repeat a work, and I never paint the same car twice.
Tell me about your car.
One email is enough. Worst case, we have a good chat about a great car. Best case, it ends up two metres wide on your wall.
There is more of my work on Instagram, the faces and the abstracts among it, in between the books.