Artist’s Statement

Statement 2011
Galen Cheney

I am a restless artist, impatient to see what’s coming next in my work.  I am always pushing, pushing, pushing the work forward, and I find myself, at times, running to catch up to it.  I am absorbing information and forming ideas all the time, and it is always a surprise to see the evolution of my work, the next iteration.  Glimpsing that mystery compels me to keep going.  As much as it is about intellectual and visual ideas, it is about the subject and process of human creativity, something I find endlessly fascinating in my own life and in that of other artists.

The work has got to be visually compelling.  At the most basic level, I want to make paintings that get your attention and keep it.  Once I have your interest, I hope that the work’s layered complexity will keep you looking and thinking and making connections to your own experience, whether you know anything about art or not.  Those are qualities I appreciate about street art, in particular.

Just as I am drawn to the beauty and mysteries embedded in the ruins of ancient cities, I am interested in the contemporary archeology of today’s urban centers.  There is an undeniable beauty in neglected city walls which show the ephemera of decades:  marks, tags, torn posters, notations, and expressions of all kinds, by artists, youths, outsiders, strivers—people connected only by geography and the desire/need to be noticed and to get a message through.  It’s often an accidental collaboration, but the synthesis of those different visual voices—the most recent being fully visible, and older ones partially obscured—is anything but dissonant.  Those layers of disparate expressions have a harmony, mystery, and sense of inevitability that I strive for in my work.

The work I am doing now marks the coming together of many concerns that have interested me throughout my painting life.  I continue to be under the spell of the transcendent possibilities of oil paint in the tradition of Joan Mitchell, Philip Guston, and others of the Abstract Expressionist movement.  The advances they made in painting continue to be relevant and their work still packs an emotional punch.  And I have long been attracted to the history, complexity, and form of language.  Much of my current work includes the use of nearly recognizable letters as abstract forms. The use of spray painted letters/language, embedded in a painterly, abstract wall painting also evokes the tension between street/outsider art and establishment/insider art.  That conversation interests me; as a formally trained painter still working on the fringes, I feel like I walk the line between those two worlds.