Seattle Atelier Teaching Blog
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.
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
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.
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
“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.
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
Link to the story: https://bylinetimes.com/2025/02/27/trumps-war-on-woke-and-dei-incubated-by-a-nazi-eugenics-foundation/
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
Complete Hope Not Hate Investigation
American Renaissance
Center for Immigration Studies
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.
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:
From their philosophy https://seattleprize.org/philosophy
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.
“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
From the Seattle Prize site.
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.
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.
Link to My Seattle Atelier Facebook
Link to My Seattle Atelier Instagram
Friday, November 13, 2020
Seattle Atelier Classroom Demonstration of Tonal Impressionist Principles, Perceptual Painting.
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.
Saturday, March 10, 2018
Michael Lane invited by Israel Hershberg to teach at the JSS In Civita Catellana 2018
Monday, June 26, 2017
Seattle Atelier Color System (intro)
Sunday, June 4, 2017
Meldrum: The Scientific Artist
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.
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.
There are couches, tables, chairs, natural light and a kitchen on the other side of the door with free coffee and snacks.













































