Galen Mercer
Grandson of two painters and the son of another, Galen Mercer was born in 1962, in Toronto, Ontario. Having painted professionally since his teens, he opted early-on for a life combining art & sport, gravitating to New York’s Catskill Mountains, where he kept a studio for two decades.
Acclaimed as one of the finest landscape and sporting artists of his generation, Galen’s range and painterly fluency are also evident in the portraits, urban scenes and still-lifes which feature among his large and diverse body of work. Having roamed extensively as a painter, he has visited and worked in, among other places: Quebec, British Columbia, Iceland, Russia, the Central Pacific, Argentina, Chile, the British Isles and France. While creating compelling images of some of the world’s wildest and most far-flung places, Mercer’s first love remains America’s richly varied lands and waters, from which he continues to draw fresh inspiration.
Galen Mercer’s art appears frequently in books, publications and the web and has been the regular feature of many articles and essays. His paintings have been avidly collected for decades and are held in numerous private collections, both abroad and in North and South America. He has appeared in both group and one-man shows, exhibiting most recently at Laurence Rockefeller’s Beaverkill Gallery.
Galen and his wife Jaimie live in Arlington, Vermont, where he presently maintains a studio.
“Galen Mercer’s paintings overflow with style and character. His preferences are flawless. This is a young master with a long future ahead of him.”
— Guy de la Valdene, Novelist & Sportsman
“Galen Mercer can be counted among America’s finest landscape painters.”
— Jack Hemingway, Author & Sportsman
"Galen Mercer's paintings can make you feel you are literally inhabiting them--that you are there. The great Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, defined the tone of a poem as its life force, that which compels you to enter it. He compared that tone to the sound a crystal wineglass makes when tapped by a spoon-a sound proprietary to and produced by the particular composition of the glass. In Galen's paintings his extraordinary eye for telling detail, his considerable technical facility with composition and subtlety of palette, and his utter immersion in the land, sea and riverscapes he represents are, you might say, the components of the wineglass. Time after time in his work the tones they produce will draw you into the pictures, make you feel at home there, and leave you with a pure, lovely resonance long after your eye has left them"
— Charles Gaines, Novelist & Sportsman