Galen Cheney – Artist
About Me
Artist
About
Berkshire Mountains-Based Artist
I’m a painter’s painter. My formal art education began at Mount Holyoke College and continued at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, where I received my MFA and was mentored by Grace Hartigan, Hermine Ford, and Salvatore Scarpitta, among other important artists.
Three decades later, I continue to push myself and my work with honesty, commitment, and fearlessness. Deep diving into my own creative process, I am a physical artist whose richly layered paintings embody my curiosity about and exploration of materials abstraction and my own psyche.
Born in Los Angeles and widely traveled, I have spent most of my life in New England where I feel a deep connection to my roots, the land, and centuries-old architecture. A childhood trip to Europe was the start of my enduring love of travel and fascination with ancient civilizations. Along with an affinity for the ancient world, I feel the gravitational pull of contemporary urban life–its grit, noise and neon graffiti and an unshakable connection to the mid-century Abstract Expressionists. In my own way I synthesize these influences to create work that is complex, and uniquely mine.
My work has been exhibited and collected widely in the U.S. and in Europe, China, Canada, and the UK. I was featured in New American Paintings (vol. 86) and was nominated for a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. Past residencies and fellowships include the Millay Colony, MASS MoCA, Vermont Studio Center, Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, and Da Wang Culture Highland.
My home and studio are in North Adams, Massachusetts, in the beautiful Berkshire Mountains. CV upon request.
Galen Cheney
Artist Statement
The period of Covid-19 has tested us all. I have been profoundly grateful for my deep well of painting ideas and for the opportunity and space to investigate them during this time. My studio practice has always been the foundation of my identity and the place I go to center and challenge myself, connect with purpose, and create beauty.
2020 provided fertile soil for sustained and concentrated creative work. During this period I have followed two tracks of work, which, though distinct in many ways, also overlap, dovetail, and otherwise inform each other and advance my work generally.
The first track of work is focused on color and form through acrylic and oil on paper or canvas. Most of the work in this show falls into this category. I quickly start each painting by laying down a bright, sometimes fluorescent color. Painting on paper is conducive to a faster, fluid process, which is what I was after in these works. When I can work quickly there is less opportunity for my mind and ego to interfere. Typically completed in a few meditative-like sessions, the paintings have a fresh, open quality, layered with loose drawing, and with some of that initial bright color pushing through to the surface. The paintings are simultaneously airy and watery and evoke natural processes, landscape, the built environment and intangible forces.
The second painting path I am on is a more open-ended, lengthier, process-driven exploration of materials and the possibilities of abstraction. It is more unconventional in nature, influenced by graffiti and decay, and existing at the intersection of painting, collage, and fiber arts. These collaged paintings, as I call them, are more built than painted, at least at the start. I make them by staining raw canvas and combining pieces of that raw canvas with remnants of other paintings and drawings and other materials. The works are not stretched when I am making them so that I can continue to add or remove portions at will. The verso of these works, with all their seams and incidental color also have richly textured surfaces, and I have begun to make works that hang away from the wall or are cut and folded to reveal areas of the reverse.
Work of this track is constructed, deconstructed, and reinvented through a creative, physical process that is challenging me and pushing my work to new places.
These works can be found here in the Collaged Paintings section of the website.
These major bodies of work are punctuated by my enduring devotion to the more direct and immediate forms of drawing and monoprinting.
