Michael Torlen

Paintings

The Artist

Michael Torlen is a visual artist, author, and Professor Emeritus of the School of Art+Design, Purchase College, State University of New York, where he taught painting and drawing, and received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. He earned his BFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art and his MFA at The Ohio State University. For his visual practice, he draws upon his California experiences both as a boy aboard ship with his commercial fisherman father and as a crewmember on a tuna purse seiner boat. Annual plein air painting trips to Monhegan Island offer additional inspiration. Although known for his landscapes of Maine, he also has a body of semi-abstract narrative work on family, cancer, love, and death themes. Torlen has exhibited widely. His work is in the collections of the Neuberger Museum of Art, Newark Museum, Housatonic Museum of Art, Springfield Art Museum, Stetson University Museum, and in numerous corporate and private collections. It appears in David Little and Carl Little’s book Art of Acadia and in Carl Little’s Paintings of Maine.He has exhibited in New York City and reviews of his work have appeared in Art in America and Artforum magazines. In Maine, Torlen’s work is affiliated with Lupine Gallery, Greenhut Galleries, and Cove Street Arts. Various small presses published Torlen’s writing and poems early in his career. In 2012, The Brooklyn Rail issued “EYEWITNESS: Reflections on Richard Artschwager’s Untitled, 1971.” Intellect Ltd published his article, “Hit with a brick: The Teachings of Hoyt L. Sherman”; in Visual Inquiry, Learning and Teaching Art in 2013. Recent articles include “Michael Torlen on John Torreano, on painters_on_painting and “Water, Water Everywhere: Tom Burckhardt’s Studio Flood,” in the Maine Arts Journal. Additional interests include an artist-in-residency at NEOC (New England Ocean Cluster) focused on the Blue Economy and NCSA (Navigating Cancer with Science and Art), a working group of scientists and artists exploring ways to communicate cancer research and awareness to diverse audiences. Torlen maintains a studio and lives in Westbrook, Maine, with his wife, author and educator, Eleanor Phillips Brackbill.

Artist Statement

My work broadly encompasses many aspects of the sea–the beauty, drama and power of the ocean; the environmental threats to the eco system and the fisheries; and the sea that supports the livelihood of families.Songs for My Father is an ongoing series of landscape and seascapes in various media, dedicated to my late father, a Norwegian commercial tuna fisherman. I painted the landscape, a long-standing Nordic subject, in and around Acadia National Park, Maine, during the 1980’s, and have worked on Monhegan Island during the summers since 1995. In winter 1999, while an artist-in-residence at Weir Farm, a national historic site administered by the National Park Service, in Wilton, CT, I began to explore the woodlands as a complement to the seacoast. In 2001, I was a visiting artist at Weir Farm.

Sanger Fra Mor (Songs from My Mother) is an ongoing narrative comprising paintings, monotypes, and graphic works often in diptych and tripych formats, juxtaposing marine imagery with sea-related iconography. Working across media in paintings, watercolors, drawings and monotypes I use commercial fishing, oral history and nostalgic images to explore memory, identity and maritime history. For both series, I draw upon my life experience, my family’s history and my experiences both as a young boy aboard ship with my father, and as a crewmember on a commercial fishing vessel. Summer trips to Monhegan Island, Maine where I paint outdoors as well as research the resources of the Monhegan Museum provide additional inspiration,

In my studio practice I make oil paintings and works on paper, including monotypes. My imagery develops from direct landscape and studio painting, photography, and memories. I often work in series, using repetition, simplification and variation of image and media, to structure narratives. My monotypes combine old and new technology in multiple layers–computer editing, digital printing and traditional printmaking methods, including lithography, silkscreen, woodblock, linoleum cut, and handwork. The layering of these processes serves as a metaphor for memory. In my work, the persistence of memory, stages of life, the environmental crisis, and the empty ocean are thematic subtexts.