Michael Alan Lorefice's THE TOWN AND THE CITY opens on Project Diana 7/9/16

​Over the last couple of years, I’ve found myself immersed in the process of drawing: pencil, charcoal, and a lot of crayons. I appreciate the simplicity of materials and the directness of mark-making.

All of my work starts from observation and spins away from there. I’ve come to see observation as something that fluctuates over time and it has come to include duration, memory, sentiment, experience. Objects and places that I thought were static are fluid and changing. Landscapes that I
see every day shift and move each time I draw them.

I’m interested in space –walking through it, sitting in it, floating through it; where things are simultaneously an arm’s reach away and a mile in the distance; how the eye can easily blur these distinctions.

I’ve always thought about Seattle as a small town: big buildings surrounded by mountains, water, and trees. There is the bustle of people and cars and a short distance away there is silence and the solitude of nature. Sometimes these things are separate, sometimes they overlap. I feel like I fall somewhere in between, pulled simultaneously in both directions.

“The town and the city” also, just coincidentally, happens to be the name of Jack Kerouac’s first major published novel.

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Michael Alan Lorefice is originally from Upstate New York, I graduated a long time ago with a B.A. from Colgate University and an M.F.A. from the Memphis College of Art.
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I’ve exhibited my paintings, drawings, and videos in solo and group shows in museums and galleries across the United States including: Second Story Contemporary and the Memphis College of Art in Memphis, Tennessee; John F. Peto Studio Museum in Island Heights, New Jersey; Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock, Arkansas; Interstitial Theatre; The Wright Exhibition Space; Kirkland Arts Center; Pratt Fine Art Center; Ouch My Eye; South Seattle Community College, Seattle, to name a few.

In addition to being a past featured artist in New American Paintings, I’ve been an artist-in-residence at Arquetopia, Oaxaca, Mexico; the Saltonstall Foundation in Ithaca, New York and the Santa Fe Art Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In recent years I’ve been heavily influenced by traditional and contemporary Mesoamerican art, and I’ve made six trips to Mexico in the past eight years to independently study and work in the country.

I also find that my teaching has strongly influenced the work that I make – I’m a Senior Lecturer and Adjunct Professor at Digipen Institute of Technology, teaching art history and drawing to B.F.A. students in game design and animation. In addition to this, I have taught studio art classes in drawing and painting at the Memphis College of Art and at Seattle-area art centers, including Gage Academy of Art; Kirkland Arts Center; and Pratt Fine Art Center.