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 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.

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 (Seattle Atelier) for many months, actually working as a designer of the intended space for the other Seattle Atelier (Images read, L to R,  “Framing out the individual spaces” and “Installing fixtures and finishing touches”)

Text and photos by Andrew Conru 

he then also went out of his way to pretend that their SA opened on the anniversary of mine (10/9) in an attempt to confuse search engines. 

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 sphere) on the left, are on or just-off of the same street (Jackson), just under 1 mile apart.

It 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 at all, history, craft or any discipline in fact and went to school in Eugene, Oregon and attempts to destroy my career with theft, 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 continues to do so by using an amateur hypeman to try to destroy my career as 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). 

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 contact information off my google business listing.

Link to My Seattle Atelier Facebook

Link to My Seattle Atelier Instagram