Bio

Galen Cheney is a painter’s painter. Her education as a painter began at Mount Holyoke College and continued at The Maryland Institute, College of Art, where she received her MFA and was mentored and critiqued by Grace Hartigan, Sal Scarpitta, and Hermine Ford, among other influential artists. Nearly 30 years later, she continues to push herself and her work with honesty, commitment, and fearlessness. Deep diving into her own creative process, Cheney is a physical artist whose richly layered paintings embody her curiosity about and exploration of materials and her own psyche. She was born in Los Angeles though has spent most of her life in New England where she feels a deep connection to the land and centuries-old architecture. A childhood trip to Europe was the start of her enduring love of travel and fascination with ancient civilizations.

Cheney’s work has been exhibited and collected in the U.S., Canada, Italy, France, Monaco, England, and China. She has had residencies/fellowships from the Millay Colony, MASS MoCA, Vermont Studio Center, Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site (Cornish, NH), and Da Wang Culture Highland (Shenzhen, China), as well as a nomination for a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in Painting. Her home and studio are in North Adams, Massachusetts.

Statement

The creative process and the exploration and manipulation of materials are the chief drivers of my work. They are the engine and the fuel. Experimentation, risk taking and pushing my own boundaries are ongoing concerns, always with an eye toward gritty beauty and a palpable energy. This energy alternately recalls natural forces or more urban frequencies.

The work I am currently making is a furthering, a deepening of work that I started during a residency in China in 2015. There, I was working with accumulated papers, building them up into multi-layered constructions. While I continue to work with paper, I have also shifted that approach to using canvas and more durable materials. The process is additive and reductive. I use fragments of past paintings, old receipts, used airline tickets, remnants of past experiences and work them into the texture of the new painting. They become one with the surface, imbuing the painting with memory, history, a sense of time, and an accidental quality, which I find beautiful and compelling. Paintings made this way—constructed, really--have a distinct object- like quality, which is satisfying.

Working in this physical way allows my mind to stay open and present in the process. It keeps me from becoming too tight and closing down the creative possibilities of a painting before it is finished. I strive to keep the painting as open as I can for as long as I can before finishing it. It is the opposite of planning a painting and then executing the plan. I prefer my paintings to have a raw, open quality.