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.
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.
More recently I have introduced liquid textile color into my work, which I pour and
brush onto raw canvas. This fluid, intensely pigmented paint soaks into the
canvas and is often difficult to control, which is an ideal way to open a path into a
painting. I am now working on combining this staining process with collage and
oil paint.
