We will re-open in the New Year (2026) after a short break, a student/teacher painting trip to the coast and the completion of some much needed renovations.
Please e-mail michaellanemcdonald@gmail.com for details.
Thank you. 
Tuesday, December 23, 2025
Monday, December 8, 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,
Tuesday, November 25, 2025
Degenerates’ Art
SEATTLE ATELIER NAME TAKEN BY WHITE NATIONALISTS
A very real connection between the classical ateliers of Seattle, 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 name (Seattle Atelier). I opened my classroom 11 years ago and Gage Academy of Art has done everything it can to close me down.
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)://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/
Conru continued:
White Nationalism and Racist Eugenics
Human Diversity Foundation
This used to be The Pioneer Fund.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Diversity_Foundation
Complete Hope Not Hate Investigation
How a Nazi organization is structured today, with emphasis equally divided between pseudo-science and media, arts and culture. (From HOPE not hate)
Link to POCIT: People of Color in Tech article (above)
Examples of Neo-Nazi Violent Opposition to Free Speech 100% Connected to Andrew Conru.
The pioneer fund was established in 1937 in Nazi Germany. It actually became the Human Diversity Fund through private investments made by Andrew Conru.
They are the same.
Link to Wycliffe Draper article above: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2002-17982-000
PIONEER FUND
Here is a quote from the new cultural partners of Gage about the superiority of Europeans compared to Africans which uses art to demonstrate.
Conru’s Art 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.
Pioneer Fund
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Fund
Link to American Renaissance
Link to Aporia Magazine
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/what-historical-event-should-all
Link to Center for Immigration Studies website
Note: After having given much time and effort as a teacher and volunteer to Gage Academy of Art in Seattle I am, once again, disappointed by how corrupt they are.
They’re 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.
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 frontispiece of the book:
From Aporia Magazine
HOPE not hate article
From their philosophy https://seattleprize.org/philosophy
In light of the art theory funded by Conru (written 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, 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. That was pretty much all I talked about.
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/or 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/or 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
Wednesday, October 15, 2025
Backstabbers, Racists and Liars.
Brett Holverstott (L.) Andrew Conru (R.)
Seattle Atelier name taken and promoted as a grass roots art revival by a neo-nazi, his adoring flunky and some shameless local painters (all of whom come from Gage Academy of Art).
Name stolen. Promoted as theirs.
Name stolen. Promoted as theirs.
Read the article about their delusional revolution 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.”
Since I started informing artists about Andrew Conru, Brett Holverstott of Figure Ground Art Advisors has been publishing that I am a “paranoid schizophrenic”, a medical slur, a false claim meant to discredit me.
Brett Holverstott has exhibited a pattern of targeting and attacking me and my business over a period of years.
My school opened on October 9, 2014
After Brett Holverstott had been actively involved in trying to erase my business for months, even designing parts of the new Seattle Atelier, he then also went out of his way to pretend that their SA opened on the anniversary of mine, in an attempt to confuse search engines.
A couple years ago Brett Holverstott left a review of my business on Facebook in which he claimed that I had prank called him posing as a journalist and I never did. I’ve never spoken to him in my life, he’s never met me. That was literally the first time I had heard from him. I had years worth of positive reviews and had to remove the entire section because of it. He has, of course, never patronized my business but he did that damage with the same nauseating amount of entitlement with which he does everything else.A couple weeks later someone whom I have never contacted even once tried to drag me into court for harassment and I think the two incidents could be connected. I believe they might have worked together to do that.
There was once a strong connection to publishing in Seattle’s academic art scene and it poisoned it with shallow, opportunistic, fame-whoring douchebags who are also beginner-level academic art students. That is Holverstott.It’s also the largest industry location for digital (game) art in the americas which creates a lot of space for illustration locally. Full of billionaires who want to platform-ize everything and also a very new city, still growing its deeply rooted art traditions. A perfectly unfortunate place for their pompous, rich, retarditaire, corporate douchebaggery.
That is what I fell prey to as soon as I trusted any of them. I stay in Seattle because my wife of 25 years is chronically ill and her work here gives her the benefits which keep her alive. She means everything to me so I stay by her side no matter what, even if it has meant becoming the entertainment for some of the pacific northwest’s richest and most pretentious sadists.
All or most of this is being done to provide Holverstott with a gallery to run (the only way he can hope to do that is with Conru providing everything including a safety net) and the close support from Gage is so he can glean from Gage to support the notion that’s been cooked up about a figurative art renaissance -culled from their passed-over faculty work and student drying racks and by stalking painters online.Get the marketing rolling and figure the rest out on the fly.
Holverstott was never educated in art at all, history, craft or any discipline in fact and went to school in Eugene, Oregon but attempts to destroy my career with lies and name calling because doing that will help him. It will help him specifically because of the close involvement of Gage Academy of Art in Seattle. The 501c3 which has used its donor’s money to put in many hours of work to destroy my LLC, Seattle Atelier, since I opened it in 2014 and now goes even further by using a local, slack-jawed wanna-be to try to destroy my career as a “paranoid schizophrenic” painter.
The thing I’ve gotten used to in Seattle is that some asskisser who’s never met me, who’s barely connected to art at all, will attack me to receive a reward from Gage (now expanded to include the White Nationalist sugar daddy Andrew Conru).
Gage once sent one of their office interns to pose as a student who called me repeatedly from the Gage offices and put me on speaker phone and asked me weird, leading questions. I thought, “this is really strange, she’s asking me about personal and medical issues, local people and politics suddenly”. I didn’t know she worked for them, she never said that, or that I was on speaker phone or that the executive director of Gage was in the room listening at the time but a detective later confirmed that that was being done. That was the same officer who made them take their information off my google business listing.
Again, I am just a painter, one person, painting, trying to sell one-of-a-kind pieces and helping some students.
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.
(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
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:
Monday, June 26, 2017
Seattle Atelier Color System (intro)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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