‘Untitled,’ oil on canvas, 60″ x 80″ 1990
GALEN GARWOOD was born in 1944 and spent most of his young life growing up on St. Simons Island, Georgia and in Charleston, South Carolina. In 1966, after one year of art at University of Georgia, he moved to Fairbanks, Alaska, where he majored in Art and Music with a minor in English. He moved to Seattle, Washington in 1971 and began exhibiting his paintings at Foster-White Gallery in 1973. He has exhibited his paintings in the United States, Europe, and Asia and his creative contributions have also been expressed in writing, poetry, multimedia and film.
In 1976 he won First Place in Painting at the Pacific Northwest Annual Exhibition and in 1979 he received the the Hassam, Speicher Award at the Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, New York. In 1995, his multimedia piece ‘Adagio’ won the Bronze Award at the International Multimedia Film Festival in Philadelphia, and in 1996 ‘Adagio’was included in the Venice Biennale’s ‘Xenograhia, Nomadic Wall’ and again at ‘Art Affair’ in New York.
His film ‘Cadmium Red Light received First Place for Narrative/Documentary at the Port Townsend International Film Festival in 2007 and his film ‘Ed and Ed’ received the First Place Award for Short Documentary for at DeReel Film Festival in Australia in 2008.
Along with American poet, Sam Hamill, he published Passport, paintings and poems, published by Broken Moon Press in 1987 and Mandala, monotypes and poems, an Homage to Morris Graves, Milkweed Editions,
In 2011, he published The One-Winged Body, a series of figurative photographs with poems by Peter Weltner, and the following year, again with Peter Weltner, Where Everything Is Water As Far As He Can See, Marrowstone Press.
In 2014 his Maenam (Water) series of photographs were published with poems by William O’Daly, Marvin Bell, Sam Hamill, James Broughton, Peter Weltner, Linda Gregg, Emily Warn, and Jeanne Morel, as MAENAM, of Water, Of Light, Marrowstone Press.
A selection from a new series of photographs, ‘The Dream Sea,’ is featured in The Road to Isla Negra, poems by William O’Daly, published by Folded Word Press in 2015.
Other images from ‘The Dream Sea’ are in a published collaboration with poet, Peter Weltner, entitled Water’s Eye, Brick House Books, 2015.
In 2017, he published his memoir, Sell the Monkey, and in 2022, he published his novella BENCH, A Story of Wonder, and in 2023, APEIRON, The Galenographs, and The GATHERING, Poems, Images, and Ruminations, Marrowstone Press
Since 2002, he has been living in Northern Thailand.
Galen Garwood, 2016