Monday, November 10, 2025

Warning.

The same people who have been trying to steal my business name Seattle Atelier are now attempting to say that my business, Seattle Atelier, is closed.

Note: it is early November 2025 when I am updating this. My business Seattle Atelier is not closed. Call 206-420-7287 for lessons. Thank you. 



Our location on Google Maps:

From Yelp 


Note: From 2016-2019 Gage Academy of Art in Seattle had their website and telephone number on my Google business listing. I called and wrote them hundreds of times and they wouldn’t change it. I had to have the police make them change it. 

They try to say, after doing something like that, that I am harassing them by exposing their behavior. 


This page was posted anonymously by people in the Seattle art community.
This page was not created by me but by someone else. I am just sharing things as I find them,

For specific information on Andrew Conru, Figure Ground Art Advisors, Gage Academy of Art, Art Love Salon, Seattle Atelier and Seattle Prize skip the “Reason for SEATTLE ATELIER” entry. 



Wednesday, October 29, 2025

The Reason for SEATTLE ATELIER



After having been a full time professor at a technological institute for digital art and in the usual atelier scene, I opened my classroom on 10/9/2014 and gave a talk on how developing people’s objective analytical abilities through painting could help eliminate fanaticism and prejudice in the world. 


I was concerned about how life lived online had already begun degrading how we see (and see each other) at the same time that the repopularization of an obsolete 19th century method of making art was validating predetermined, limited ways of seeing (and thinking) for art students.  I talked to them about not consciously moving backward into propaganda making, about not creating carefully crafted visual lies and about resistance to so-called opportunities to make art that justifies and serves extremists or the self-appointed leaders of movements and cults.


On that night, the SA was founded for dissenters in culture wars that take place on digital platforms. 

As dissenters, we take pride in being useless to all sides.


Michael Lane
Founder of Seattle Atelier
Alumnus of The Pennsylvania
Academy of the Fine Arts
October, 2025





“To give a sincere and truthful representation of a portion of the beauty of Nature in correct tones so as to give as nearly as possible an exact illusion of reality.”


Clarice Beckett


Friday, August 22, 2025

Degenerates’ Art

SEATTLE ATELIER NAME TAKEN BY WHITE NATIONALISTS

A very real  connection between the classical ateliers, Nazis and big tech. Is anyone surprised?

Andrew Conru who is partnered with Figure Ground Art Advisors and Gage Academy of Art conspired to take my business (Seattle Atelier).  I opened my classroom 11 years ago and Gage Academy of Art has done everything it can for to close me down. The people from Gage are now apparently partnered with white nationalists to do it. 


The Guardian story about the principal benefactor of the new Seattle Atelier, the partner of Figure Ground Art Advisors and Gage Academy of Art in Seattle and the creator of the Art Love Salon,
Andrew Conru 



LINK TO THE STORY (Oct. 16, 2024) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/16/revealed-international-race-science-network-secretly-funded-by-us-tech-boss 




“What is white identity?”


Conru continued:


White Nationalism and Racist Eugenics 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Diversity_Foundation

(Aporia Magazine)

https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/what-historical-event-should-all


Violent Opposition to Free Speech 

https://metro.co.uk/2024/10/19/director-furious-lff-pull-far-right-documentary-safety-fears-21827138/?ico=trending-post-strip_item_4


https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/oct/19/undercover-film-exposing-uk-far-right-activists-pulled-from-london-film-festival


Complete Hope Not Hate Investigation

 https://investigations.hopenothate.org.uk/race-science-inc/?utm_source=debrief-newsletter.beehiiv.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=year-of-the-rat-the-journalist-who-exposed-the-new-supremacist-right 


American Renaissance 

https://www.amren.com/


Center for Immigration Studies 

https://cis.org/



Note: After having given so much time and effort to Gage Academy of Art in Seattle I am, once again, deeply disappointed by how corrupt they are.



They’re happily staffing this school founded in my stolen business name from the classical ateliers at Gage and it is obvious that they hoped this partnership would permanently close me down and erase my work. Something they’ve been trying to accomplish for 11 years. This is exactly the kind of extremely dishonest behavior I have, unfortunately, come to expect from them.



Here is a quote from the new cultural partners of Gage about the superiority of Europeans compared to Africans,
using art to demonstrate.

This publication was entirely made possible by a “generous grant” from Andrew Conru

From: “Why Ideology and not Science Dominates Debate on Ethnicity and Race in the Modern World” by Simon Webb


'Within a few thousand years, the blink of an eye, compared with the time scale to which past changes had been measured, the hybrids had become transformed into what was almost a new species. The difference between this emergent breed and those which had gone before was breath-taking. Looking at Illustration 21, we can see the sort of art produced by the Homo sapiens before they left Africa. These are nothing more than doodles, consisting of scratches which signify little other than a vague awareness of the concept of symmetry. In what will one day become Europe, the Neanderthals who lived there before the coming of the hybrids were also producing nothing more than similar random scratches and the occasional pattern of straight lines on the wall of a cave. Within a few years of the arrival of what we might as well call Homo sapiens + in Europe, works of art like that seen in Illustration 22 were being crafted. It is obvious that whoever made this strange object was quite simply on a different intellectual plane from those who had gone before. For one thing, this figure, known as the lion man, is representative, rather than merely decorative. It is meant to portray something. Not only that, it is meant to show us something not in the real world, but a figure which existed only in the mind of the creator. Neither he, or she, had ever seen a man with the head of a lion; it had been imagined and then the pure thought had somehow been made manifest for all to see. This achievement, showing in solid form an image which had been conjured up in another person’s mind, showed the immeasurable gulf which separated Homo sapiens + from their ancestors.” (Page 385- 386, The Equalitarian Dogma, Simon Webb, 2021).

From the HOPE not hate article, linked above:



Conru’s fully funded experiment along these lines is called Seattle Atelier under which The Seattle Prize is housed. This is being done at the same time that he is removing Queer and BIPOC voices from the culture.




From their philosophy https://seattleprize.org/philosophy


In light of the art theory funded by Conru (by Webb) who makes the assertion that Africans are not human, not Homo sapiens, and therefore incapable of making human art, Conru’s touting of a philosophy called “Rehumanism” suggests that it is an attempt to prevent a slip into a subhuman state culturally via his program. 

Wednesday, July 2, 2025

Fascists are as Fascists do.


Brett Holverstott (L.) Andrew Conru (R.) 

Seattle Atelier name taken and promoted by NeoNazis and their collaborators as a grass roots art revival. 
Tenaya Sims of Gage Academy

“For the first time since the great patrons and the church supported artists.”


Read the article about the “revolution” they’re staging together in Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine, July/August 2025 issue.



“My greatest curatorial achievement…was inspired by Andrew Conru's vision.” -Brett Holverstott

Holverstott has described Conru as a “cultural visionary.” 




Nazi Art Theory Reborn

Kunst Dem Volk Reborn 

Conru’s philosophy, from his Seattle Prize site. 


Brief Analysis:


From the Seattle Prize site. 


Brief Analysis:


Kunst Dem Volk

Translated as Art for the People in Nazi Germany but with Volk having a special meaning which is based on so-called aryan bloodlines (genetics) with mystical connotations. 

The alt reich is obsessed with uniting and healing this presumed shared spirit as well as seeing it expressed once again in art which they believe demonstrates their natural superiority (which they claim is shown through a grotesque weaponization of art history). 

I believe the "people" this art is really meant to serve, heal, unite are Conru and his ilk, i.e., 

white nationalists. 

It is at times like these, as with the revival of Nazi eugenics, that they and their real beliefs come out into the light.






My school opened on October 9, 2014

Brett Holverstott actively tried to erase my business and then also went out of his way to pretend their SA opened on the anniversary of mine, in an attempt to confuse search engines.



Friday, November 13, 2020

Seattle Atelier Classroom Demonstration of Tonal Impressionist Principles, Perceptual Painting.

Michael Lane Dounder of Seattle Atelier painting in front of students.

Class demo at Seattle Atelier, explaining tonal extensions, tone key, tonal relationships, multiple colors in five values or less and the order of visual importance. 

(Image features works by Max Meldrum, Percy Leason, Joseph Allworthy, Graeme Inson and John Singer Sargent.)


The program’s general textbooks are “The Science of Appearances” (1950) by Max Meldrum and “Experience in Painting, an Analysis of the Visual Impression as Applied to Painting” by Percy Leason.

Little Saigon Neighborhood, Seattle, WA.





Seattle Atelier listed on the Seattle Street-Art Map. 










Saturday, March 10, 2018

Michael Lane invited by Israel Hershberg to teach at the JSS In Civita Catellana 2018


From left: Students Kathy Paul, Min Zhong and Eve Parker make Alla Prima paintings at some marshes north of Seattle.

I’ve been invited by Israel Hershberg, for the third year in a row, to join the affiliate faculty at the JSS in Civita Castellana.
The title of the course this year is "Corot, Tonalism and the Roman Campagna" 

Dates are: July 23-August 6, Civita Castellana, Italy. 
Link: 



Seattle Atelier students painting at Alki Beach, West Seattle

Seattle Atelier students painting at Pike Place Market, Seattle
Seattle Atelier students painting on a beach in West Seattle

Monday, June 26, 2017

Seattle Atelier Color System (intro)


Seattle atelier student painting


Once students have begun to master tonal divisionism or correctly related tone groups or families (referred to by Camille Pissarro as “the greatest innovation of Impressionism”) they begin working in color.

Our system uses three hues (warm, straight, cool) for all primaries and secondaries, so it’s an 18 hue color-wheel.

Students mix ten complete color wheels on top of a set of ten gray-scale value cards, matching the value of each. 


Seattle Atelier color chart lesson




Sunday, June 4, 2017

Meldrum: The Scientific Artist




Max Meldrum diagram from The Science of Appearances, Seattle Atelier, WA

Max Meldrum diagram from The Science of Appearances. Seattle Atelier



Hayward Veal walks the full length of his narrow studio because this is the only way to paint. 

It is Max Meldrum’s way. 

Examine the subject from a distance. 

You are objective. 

Detached both from the subject and yourself. 

The artist, Meldrum says, is a scientist of appearances.



Max Meldrum self portrait. Seattle Atelier


Meldrum’s views were political as well. He saw most contemporary artists as the economic dependents of the “business men”. A system wherein the private buyer chooses, recognizes and elevates the artist. Meldrum saw himself as a painter who was indifferent to this system.

He was a pacifist during World War I, a supporter of the anti-fascist movement in the 1930s and of disarmament during the Cold War.



Thursday, April 13, 2017

Bibliophile Confessions

A partial view, from a video, of the Seattle Atelier library where many ring-bound copies of print-outs of old manuscripts and very rare artist's teaching and studio notes, letters and diaries from the archives at Harvard, Yale, the Smithsonian, National Gallery-Archives of American Art and many other libraries wait for you.


Open to the public without charge during business hours, with several scanners for free use and very inexpensive flash drives available for purchase.
There are couches, tables, chairs, natural light and a kitchen on the other side of the door with free coffee and snacks.

Visit us soon on historic Jackson Street in Seattle’s arts-filled Central District and Little Saigon neighborhoods, where there’s usually some kind of great festival happening.


Wednesday, April 12, 2017

Seattle Atelier Still Life Courses


All our still life classes are alla prima and solvent free.
Students finish each painting in one session after carefully creating their palettes as a scale of relationships.

In the above image student Jennifer Will creates a sight size Alla Prima still life in less than an hour, walking back and forth from her focus point, after first taking a couple hours to create a group of pre-mixed correctly related tone families and colors within each. 


Students enjoy getting at a subjects visual essence in this objective way and the classroom is open to students at all times and they often stay well past the four hour to six hour class times. 

In the image below student Kathy Paul stands at her “focus point” twelve feet from her canvas, sensing out her shapes as she tries out her initial tone group “hypotheses”, adjusting constantly at this stage by physically adjusting large piles of paint on her palette and testing them against each other. 
That is not a value-match of each area but a painting of their relationships. 
 Anyone familiar with the general textbooks for the program also knows how many diagrams, charts, exercises and other practices help explain this both natural and analytical process. Frequent instructor painting demonstrations show the process.  



(Below: Student’s Alla Prima works in progress. Limited and full-color palettes)

 



Twice Yearly Free Introductory Classes and Painting Demonstrations, Daniel Smith, Seattle (2014-2020).