Dance Me to the End exhibition

Here’s the news of my upcoming show

Dance Me to the End, paintings and monoprints, on view from February 10 to April 9, 2022

Cove Street Arts, 71 Cove Street, Portland, Maine.

The exhibition opens February 10 from 5-7 PM

Dance Me to the End, paintings and monoprints, is on view from February 10 to April 9, 2022, at Cove Street Arts, Portland, Maine. The exhibition opens February 10 from 5-7 pm.

Dance Me to the End comprises paintings and monoprints selected from two series: The Dancers and Memento Mori. For this work, I am thinking about themes of life, love, and death, and W.B. Yeats who said, “Sex and death are the only things that can interest a serious mind.”

Memento Mori reframes the centuries-old convention into a 21^st-century context. While undergoing chemotherapy, I asked my nurse about the colors of the I.V. meds. She told me different meds have different colors. I also asked my radiation oncologist to show me some of the digital images he used to guide my treatments. The images were inspiring. After treatment, I decided to make a series of paintings using a palette of high contrasting chromatics, derived from the chemo-colors, and a cast of characters in a medical technology-influenced world of anxiety, complexity, and contradiction.

The Dancers are from a series of multi-layered, mixed media monoprints of a dancing couple, floating within a vintage, nostalgic Times Square image, stirred by my first NYC visit at age 20. The works contain several printmaking processes—oil and water-based inks, woodcut, lithography, linoleum blocks, stencils, and hand coloring—and each has a song lyric as its title. The exhibition’s title, Dance Me to the End, is from a Leonard Cohen song.

I completed this body of work concurrently with my Monhegan and Ocean Blues marine-inspired projects. Carl Little wrote a profile of me and my work this past summer, July/August 2021, in Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors, “Michael Torlen: Tied to the Sea.” If you’d like to see more of my work before the exhibition, check out my website, http://www.michaeltorlen.com, or you would be welcome for a studio visit in Westbrook, anytime, should you ever get to Maine.