Galen Cheney

Galen Cheney was born in Los Angeles and has spent most of her life in New England, where she maintains a deep connection to the region’s landscape, history, and architecture. A childhood trip to Europe sparked an enduring fascination with ancient civilizations, while her work also draws on the energy of contemporary urban life and the legacy of mid-century Abstract Expressionism. These influences converge in paintings that are layered, complex, and distinctly her own.

Her work has been widely exhibited and collected across the United States and internationally, including in Europe, China, Canada, and the United Kingdom. She has been featured in New American Paintings (Vol. 86) and was nominated for a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant. Her residencies and fellowships include the Millay Colony for the Arts, MASS MoCA, the Vermont Studio Center, Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park, and Da Wang Culture Highland.

Cheney lives and works in the Berkshires, Massachusetts.

"My work is a mystery to me that I have been mining for 40 years.

I am okay with uncertainty in my work.  Life is uncertain and brief—why would painting be any different?  Just as I may have intentions for the day or the year, chance intervenes and life unfolds of its own accord.  I have to be awake and attentive to the unexpected, and so it is with painting.  How confident am I feeling that day, how bruised my ego, what is the light like, what were my dreams the previous night—these factors are as important as any idea I might have about how to move a painting forward.  Mine is an interior process; the not knowing is scary, addictive, and central to how I make art.

A painting starts with a whiff of an idea, just enough to enter the pool.  Those first strokes will not be seen in the finished painting, but are crucial to its direction.  It makes sense that all the paintings are different from one another.  They are cousins to one another, sharing DNA, yet are distinct in personality and point of view.  It couldn’t be otherwise, as each painting informs the next and each day informs the next.

Painting is how I meet the world and feel alive during my brief transit through it. "

Galen Cheney