Michael Torlen
Target (from Memento Mori) 2018, Acrylic and Flashe on canvas on panel, 30” x 27”
Michael Torlen is a painter, printmaker, writer, and Professor Emeritus of the School of Art+Design at Purchase College, State University of New York, where he taught painting and drawing. He earned his BFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art and his MFA at Ohio State University.
Torlen has exhibited widely. His work is in the collections of several museums as well as in corporate and private collections. In Maine he has shown work at Archipelago Gallery, Bayview Gallery, Jonathan Frost Gallery, and Lupine Gallery on Monhegan Island. His work appears in David Little and Carl Little’s book Art of Acadia and in Carl Little’s Paintings of Maine. Carl Little’s profile, “Michael Torlen: Tied to the Sea,” recently appeared in the July/August 2020 issue of Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors.
Torlen has published poetry, articles, essays, and art reviews and has written a book about painting, drawing, and perception, due out in 2023.He maintains a studio and lives in Westbrook, with his wife, author Eleanor Phillips Brackbill.
Statement
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 21st 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.
