Michael Dines

With a career spanning from the late 1980’s to the present, Michael Dines (b. 1963) is regarded as a leader in the re-emerging popularity of landscape painting. He has explored multiple genres and styles both non-objective and objective. His paintings have been exhibited across the United States and placed in corporate, public and private collections internationally. His work has continually examined the relationship between abstraction and realism, continually probing the use of a complex variety of alternative materials and techniques. The result is paintings that draw one into investigating beyond the pictorial to the intensely worked non-pictorial layers. His work extends the debate over what is subject matter in picture making and what is the purpose of art, a statement to spur discussion or merely decoration.

Dines was born in the Ohio Valley river town of Parkersburg, West Virginia. He studied fine art and graphic design at Fairmont State College in West Virginia from 1983 to 1985. He then moved to Atlanta Georgia to study illustration at the advertising arts school, The Portfolio Center. There he met his now-wife, photographer Erica Dines and in the summer of 1987 they left for New York. He found work as a freelancer illustrator and then began to work as an art handler and preparator in SoHo galleries and the Whitney Museum. In 1989, Richard Armstrong, a curator at the Whitney, introduced Dines to benefactor Lois Plehn who began to advocate for Dines and subsequently represented him. She connected him with prominent art curator and consultant Jeffrey Deitch, who arranged the sale of several of Dines’ early abstracts. Plehn continued to promote Dines while placing his work into private and corporate collections.

In 1991, Dines left New York and returned to Atlanta with Erica to start a family. In 1992 they took up residence in a spacious art studio in the new Marietta Street Art Corridor. There he continued to produce the paintings that had earned him attention in New York. That year his work was curated into Nexus Contemporary Art Centers, The Atlanta Biennial. The exhibition included such notable southern artists as, Kara Walker, Donald Locke, and Radcliffe Bailey. Up to this point as an artist Dines had an absolute commitment to non-objective painting and an exploration of indirect methods of painting. Following the Biennial show Dines began to incorporate found objects, photography, and figurative elements into his work. In 1993, his paintings became more simplified as he settled into landscape imagery. The paintings were textured, with intentional cracking and almost all the paintings had a small photograph embedded in the center of the panel.

Dines’ first one-man show was at The Lowe Gallery in November of 1994. Six months prior, he donated a couple of his landscapes to a popular fund-raising gala. Bill Lowe the auctioneer during the event. Two days later Lowe was in Dines’ studio offering him a one-man show. That fall Dines filled the sprawling gallery with two dozen monumental paintings. The success of that first show led to a yearly one-man exhibitions every fall until 1997.

Beginning in 1998, renowned art dealer, Fay Gold began representing Dines until her gallery was shuttered in 2009. During that time the gallery exhibited his work in four one-man shows and multiple group exhibits. The shows included landscapes, figurative work and his video installations. After the closing of the gallery Dines stepped away from exhibiting and began a period of exploration. His involvement in photography with Erica resulted in the consideration of photography in his work and its relationship to image making with paint. He explored a variety of subject matter and the relevance of focus and its association with the painted image. Since 2010, Dines’ landscapes have grown in popularity but he still counters the notion that he is a landscape painter, declaring “ The landscapes or any other portrayal, for me, is the beginning point. When you look deeply into my paintings, you will see the drips, the pours, the thin sheets of tone and worn surfaces, the layers of texture. All of this work is the stuff I deal with when I paint. It is the struggle that is the subject matter. If a viewer only sees the work as a landscape then the viewer isn’t slowing down and really having a good look, then asking why. ”