Form/Space Atelier Program For June 2010
Show Title: Recent Studies and Paintings
Show Duration: June 17-July 11,2010
Vernissage: June 17, 6PM as part of the www.BELLTOWNARTWALK.com
Recent Paintings and Studies is a solo show of paintings by master artist Michael Lane. Subjects of the exhibit include images of the artists recently deceased mother.
Michael Lane was given private art lessons all throughout grade and middle school. He was exhibiting as semi-professional artist from the age of 11, and as a professional artist by age 14.
His concentration in art throughout high school focused on printmaking under guidance of Tyler School of Art trained instructor William Luber (stone lithography, screen printing, intaglio, relief printmaking techniques and illustration).
After leaving high school in 1984, he worked as a professional portrait and wedding photographer and in dark rooms for commercial printing companies in Philadelphia, PA while training at night in traditional figurative painting techniques at Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia during the week and at The Philadelphia Sketch Club on weekends.
He began full-time fine art study on a full scholarship at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1988 as a painting major with a sculpture minor, studying under Ben Kamahira, Roswell Weidner, Sidney Goodman, Lou Sloan, Elizabeth Osbourne and Arthur De Costa.
In 1994, he went on to assist the great artist/chemist/art historian Arthur De Costa in his studio, and in 1995 Lane began a two-year private apprenticeship with celebrity portrait painter Nelson Shanks at his home and studio in Andalusia, PA. "This was the most important phase of my training. Nelson taught me to paint," Lane says.
While executing commissioned portraits and teaching drawing over the next 10 years, he began designing sets for theater, film and TV, and went on to work for Boston Lyric Opera, Opera Company of Philadelphia, Santa Fe Opera, Seattle Opera, Pacific Northwest Ballet and many other companies and as designer, painter and sculptor.
He also ran a print shop, mural company, faux-finishing studio, mold-making service and sculpture department for fabrication companies.
Lane is now happy to be a full-time painter and part-time fine-art teacher in Seattle, WA. He is represented by Seattle gallery Form/Space Atelier.
Artist's Statement
People make art in order to enlarge their means of expression. Art is a powerful means of communication which can convey things to an audience which using words alone cannot. We are artists because we have a strong desire to interest others in what has interested us. We render an object and/or convey our feelings to make those feelings or that object real to another person. Our art can be said to be successful in the proportion that it produces these shared feelings of reality in a viewer.
In taking up the study of any art a vast field is unfolded. To the earnest student, it means unlimited possibilities and endless sources of delight. Robert Henri said ‘When the artist is alive in any person, he or she becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature.’
The artist applies much careful thought when choosing what to include in a work of art. It is in the value of what we think that we develop as artists. We develop our thoughts along with our eyes.
The true artist must be a careful workman. We work towards a true mastery of our materials and tools and strive for a complete understanding of the medium in which we work. The more we study art the more we realize that materials are of great importance in the expression of thought.
But we are not only artists when we have a tool in hand. We are always artists, and are busy seizing impressions and suggestions and storing them in mind for a later time. We learn, as artists, to be interested in and to derive great pleasure from seeing what other people have not learned to see so that we can then share these feelings and impressions.
It is a field which requires vital, intense effort but one which affords us all the chance to grow as unique individuals. Ernest Dimnet, the great French writer and lecturer declared “the thinker, whether he or she wishes to or not, is a leader…The thinker is preeminently a person who sees where others do not’.
For additional information and images of Michael Lane's work, please visit
www.michaellane.net.
