The art of Bert Menco
Original paintings from Bert Menco’s personal world of figures, stories and imagination.
Three bodies held in one quiet balance — light, reflection and the ground beneath our feet. Painted in the stillness of the Ragdale woods, it carries the calm of someone who looked up at the sky and saw a family. To live with this canvas is to keep a small cosmos in your home: warm, watchful, and endlessly turning.
She stands as a heron stands — patient, elegant, slightly apart from the world. Bert loved the moment where a person becomes something else, and here grace and wildness share a single body. A painting for someone who knows that true elegance is always a little strange.
A figure caught in the turning, where motion becomes prayer and dizziness becomes joy. The colours spin outward like a skirt in mid-whirl. It is one of the most joyful things Bert left behind — a reminder that surrender can be its own kind of freedom.
Painted late in his life, Ablaze burns with a heat that refuses to fade. There is no hesitation in it — only colour, conviction and the urgency of a man who still had so much to say. Hung on a wall, it changes the temperature of a room.
Every one of us carries a picture of home that no address can match. Bert, who crossed an ocean and returned again, painted his as a place of the heart rather than of bricks. Tender and a little wistful, this is a work to be lived with, not merely looked at.
A light held up in the dark — for whom, we are never told. Beacon is among Bert's final paintings, and it feels like a message left on purpose: keep looking, keep searching, someone is watching over the way. A singular piece for a collector who believes in signals.
Two lives, tied by something neither can name. Bound speaks of the closeness that both shelters and constrains us — love, family, history. Now held in a private collection in Chicago, it remains one of Bert's most intimate meditations.
Faces that seem to have drifted in from memory, gathered together as if waiting to be remembered. For an artist born into a family that survived the war, the presence of souls was never abstract. This quiet, haunting canvas now lives in a private collection in Amsterdam.
Seeing, hearing, touching, tasting — the scientist who studied how we smell painted the wonder of perception itself. Senses is where Bert's two worlds met: precise curiosity and pure imagination. It is held today in a private collection in Chicago.
Spring, summer, autumn, winter — a whole year folded into one luminous surface. Like the music it echoes, it moves from lightness to gravity and back again. A celebration of time passing, now cherished in a private collection in Amsterdam.
The one in the corner, the one wearing the paper hat — Bert always had a soft spot for the misunderstood. Funny and sorrowful at once, Dunce asks who the fool really is. It belongs today to a private collection in River Forest, Illinois.
An ancient image of tenderness, transplanted to the open American plains where Bert made his life. Painted largely at the Ragdale Foundation, she is serene, protective and unmistakably his. The family has chosen to keep this painting; it is not offered for sale.
A star-covered hat, a warm yellow world, and little figures held high as though imagination itself had become a companion. There is playfulness here, but also something tender: the wish to keep those we love close, even in a world that will not stand still. Seen alongside Bert’s life story, this image invites us to hold on to humour without letting go of feeling.
Three panels open like three chapters of a remembered dream. A bowed crowned figure, a blue face holding smaller figures close, and a sun-like presence cradling a child bring vulnerability and care into the same quiet space. Bert described this work as another Madonna variation; its intimacy lies in the way tenderness passes from one panel to the next, never quite leaving the room.
Three faces gather close, each carrying a different colour and a different silence. One looks outward, one meets us directly, and one rests behind closed eyes; above them, playing-card symbols turn the darkness into a small theatre of possibility. Their closeness feels like a portrait of belonging — the extraordinary comfort of being together without needing to be the same. It is a tender way to remember the imagination Bert left with us.
At the centre, a seated figure folds into a moment of stillness while little green-clad figures circle a delicate yellow enclosure. The surrounding movement makes that solitude feel all the more human. Perhaps we recognise the private room each of us carries within: a place where memory, company and longing continue to move, even when we are quiet. This reading of the image keeps Bert’s world close without claiming to resolve its mystery.
A woman in red meets a blue figure whose world has quite literally turned upside down. Between their lifted hands, surprise becomes a kind of conversation, suspended against a purple field scattered with gold. The image offers a gentle, mischievous thought: closeness need not depend on seeing the world in the same way. In the spirit of Bert’s enduring story, difference becomes an invitation rather than a distance.