Remnants

It is Thursday, August 13, 2026, almost ten months after the arduous and costly fight to save my business and some of the proof of the attempted theft, by people closely linked to Gage Academy of Art, is still online.

Mapquest still reads that my business is operated by Andrew Cornu and his foundation (below)

That is my business location on the map

This is the general search result (below) with a photo I took of my students (L. to R. Tabitha Brown, Jennifer Small) next to it.

At one time all the search engine results went to them. 

Something I built alone and still run alone was stolen from me by an non-profit-operating oligarch with very strong ties to White Nationalism and his supporters at the non-profit Gage Academy of Art and the LLC Figure Ground Art Advisors. 

When I announced my plans to open a small painting school I was contacted by many art centers in the area who wanted to partner with me. They had heard nothing but good things about me and were eager  to do all the promotions and office work for it.

They all went silent after they were contacted by the then manager at Gage who told them that doing so would “jeopardize the nature of the relationship between the two institutions”. 

There were also many regular enrolled students and other instructors with whom I had worked who expressed their willingness to get involved and they were all told the same thing (or perhaps worse).

This was based on greed alone and I was vilified because I was taking some of their business away.

When I was a popular instructor at Gage they had a policy whereby they told the registrars that if it was a students’ first class at Gage to make sure they took a course taught by Michael Lane. That is because they would continue to take my classes after having taken one. I also made a lot of recommendations to my repeat-students to take other courses (especially sculpture) both of which made the school a lot of money.

After I opened my own small classroom the policy changed. From then on all promotional materials for my small business were to be discarded if any were left or posted in their building and no one was allowed to openly discuss what I was doing. 

I started writing them asking what was wrong and if they could do something about this situation. I wrote many times.

They gathered those emails and used them by handing them over to a now former independent contractor at Gage who applied for an order of protection against me with only my inquiring emails (which I sent to this non-profit) to make a claim of “harassment”. They shared those internal documents with an independent contractor who attempted to drag me into court just so they could say that it had been necessary. They did it just to have a story and to then spread the story. I saw that, was very dismayed, and never showed up.

The next time I heard from them was after an old yahoo email account had been hacked by a jewelry company in Hong Kong which sent offers to all my contacts. It spammed an old forgotten contact list which Gage was on.

They, Gage Academy of Art, said that was a violation and tried to drag me back into court. 

I never showed up.

I never had any money then and had only 5 days to prepare and I faltered. If I had it to do over again I would have gone in and fought them. I gave in and kept working hard, hoping for the best.

When a full investigation was conducted which involved the Seattle police, that independent contractor and that now former school manager were asked to move on.

. 

TIMELINE:

October 2014- School for Perceptual Painting is founded at 1426 Jackson Street, Seattle.

December 2016- Invited by Israel Hershberg to participate in the prestigious summer art residency program, the JSS in Civita in Civita Castellana Italy.

December 2016- Gage provides internal documents to an independent contractor to use for a claim of harassment.

December 2017- Invited again to participate in the prestigious summer residency program JSS in Civita.

December 2017- Spam from a jewelry company used to claim further harassment.

(December 2018- I continue working hard despite all of this and am invited a third time to the JSS)

April 2023- An amateur art advisor in Seattle who has never met me and who handles the art of current and former Gage independent contractors and students leaves a review of my business on Facebook claiming that I have been prank calling him and warns people to “keep their distance” from me. 

February 2025- That same amateur art advisor, who works with all the friends of the people dismissed, participates in the creation of a new “Seattle Atelier” less than one mile from my location, on the same street. An entire building is renovated for its home. (All of the participants from Gage are friends of the now dismissed people.) I fight them and they change their name.

November 2025- The same amateur art advisor posts that I am a paranoid schizophrenic to whom no one should listen.

Despite all of this I am very glad and proud to have created a school for perceptual painting in Seattle.

My loyal following has sustained me over the years and I am eternally grateful to them.

Harassment Campaign Against Me and My Business.

People connected to Figure Ground Art Advisors and The Conru Art Foundation recently published that I, Michael Lane, “attempt to use a teaching blog to make claims about (their) groups’ misappropriation of the name Seattle Atelier”

Do the documents created by that same group (below) show that they took the name Seattle Atelier, or not?

“Seattle Atelier provides fully funded, one-year-plus fellowships.”

“Conru…purchased Pioneer Square’s Occidental Fine Arts Building…as the future home of Seattle Atelier.”

And this, from Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine, Summer 2025:

“But Holverstott isn’t abandoning Pioneer Square”

 

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:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/fpFzKpiJx9Q87ymk8

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. 

Link to page (below)

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,

 

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 

Link to the Film:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=bPJnDj5ist0&fbclid=IwY2xjawN4u7ZleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFYbVlLQUR6RXdRUDJjQWMwc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHkDa5eekhxAriwvQnV0XyqEJ7Ng3BAJC0COAPZRdtL6B4SfPKsxkxC2JIezc_aem_ZGyHtXA15O7ia8hLsiFX4Q

Human Diversity Foundation 

This used to be The Pioneer Fund.

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

From the HOPE not hate article: 

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 

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)

https://peopleofcolorintech.com/articles/this-tech-mogul-secretly-funded-a-discredited-race-science-group/

Examples of Neo-Nazi Violent Opposition to Free Speech 100% Connected to Andrew Conru.

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

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

The Pioneer Fund, The Third Reich And Today’s ‘Race Realists’ film 

Link: https://youtu.be/rsDO9ywMEis?si=N41MohHyNmxUxD-c

PIONEER FUND 

Pioneer Fund 

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

Link to American Renaissance 

https://www.amren.com/

Link to Aporia Magazine

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

Link to Center for Immigration Studies website

https://cis.org/

“Conru…purchased Pioneer Square’s Occidental Fine Arts Building, now under renovation as the future home of SEATTLE ATELIER.”

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.

Here is a quote from the new cultural partners of Gage about the superiority of Europeans compared to Africans which uses 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 frontispiece of the book:

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.

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. 

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 also about resistance to so-called opportunities to make art that justifies and serves political and/or religious extremists or the self-appointed leaders of beauty school 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

“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

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.

From above: “SEATTLE ATELIER PROVIDES FULLY FUNDED ONE-YEAR-PLUS FELLOWSHIPS…”

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

Holverstott went out of his way to post on that date that their SA was “getting rolling” in an attempt to confuse search engines.

Brett Holverstott was very actively involved in trying to erase my business (Seattle Atelier), working as a designer of the intended space for the other Seattle Atelier (Images below read, L to R,  “Framing out the individual spaces” and “Installing fixtures and finishing touches”)

Text and photos by Andrew Conru 

A couple years ago, months before the building for their “Seattle Atelier” was acquired, 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.

A couple weeks after that 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.

Below are the comparative locations of “the two Seattle Ateliers”, mine, the original, is on the right, theirs (the red ball) on the left, are on or just-off of the same street (Jackson), just under 1 mile apart.

It also appears to be where Holverstott’s informal, i.e., never officially listed among Seattle art galleries, exhibition space (“Figure Ground”) was located.

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. Also full of billionaires who want to platform-ize everything and a very new city, still growing its deeply rooted art traditions. A perfectly unfortunate place for their dodgy douchebaggery.

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 and went to school in Eugene, Oregon and attempts to destroy my career with theft, lies and name calling because doing those things 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 continues to do so by using an amateur hypeman to try to destroy my career by calling me a  “paranoid schizophrenic”.

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). 

Note: Holverstott/Figure Ground Art Advisors are looking for “painters trained in traditional ateliers who display extreme technical brilliance.” 

And claims to have closed their physical space in Pioneer Square in order to “scale up it’s advocacy” and then lists the address of Andrew Conru’s “Art Love Salon” as the location for this scaled up advocacy. 

Link to My Seattle Atelier Facebook

Link to My Seattle Atelier Instagram

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.

Link to the School Page

Seattle Atelier listed on the Seattle Street-Art Map. 

Link to Seattle Street-Art Map  

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: 

https://jssincivita.com/michael-lane/

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.