| Grandson of two painters and the son of another, Galen Mercer was born in 1962 in Toronto, Ontario. Painting professionally since his late teens, after graduating from fine arts school Thornton Hall Academy, Galen opted for a life combining art and sport, gravitating to New York’s Catskill Mountains where he maintained a studio for almost two decades. Today he is widely considered among the finest land-waterscape and sporting artists of his generation.
His diverse body of work is characterized by a delight in and acute sensitivity to color and rhythm, united within graceful and dynamic compositions. Deeply schooled in classic artistic traditions and possessing exceptional formal technique, Galen Mercer’s art embodies the vigor and bracing immediacy of the modern. Equally fluent in portraiture, landscape and still life, his painting takes as its subject the whirl and innate vitality of nature, yet remains highly sensitive to quiet, organizing harmonies. |