" I have spent most of my life learning that the things worth doing require an unreasonable amount of patience and an equally unreasonable belief that they will work. Building the Los Angeles Art Atelier is the fullest expression of both. It is not a business I decided to start. It is the business I was always going to build."

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THE STORY BEHIND MY BUSINESS

Painting didn't find me until I was thirty years old.

In film school, we were assigned a book called The Artist's Way and asked to write a list of ten things we wanted to be when we grew up with a commitment to actually try each one. I took my first ballet class at twenty-six. Awkward doesn't begin to cover it. By thirty, I had worked my way to number ten: painting. I bought a small kit from Aaron Brothers, two brushes, and used a paper grocery bag as my canvas. Using a photo of a friend as reference, I sat and painted for hours. Something inside me woke up. The top of my head began to tingle with a strange, electric energy, and I knew with a certainty I had never felt before, that this was meant for me. Twenty-six years later, I still feel that sensation when I pick up a brush.

What began as a lifelong creative practice grew into an international exhibition career including juried shows at the European Museum of Modern Art in Barcelona, Marin Museum of Modern Art, invited artist at the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art, a solo exhibition in Chicago, several public murals including a mural at the Bombay Beach Biennale, and work currently on view at the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles. I have been featured in Poets and Artist Magazine, American Contemporary Artist Magazine and Realism Magazine. 

But the credential that matters most for this Atelier is not on a gallery wall: it is the person who looked up from her drawing after weeks of coming back and said, quietly, “I can't believe I just did that”.

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Hosting drawing sessions began as a practical answer: a way to be immersed in art full time without waiting for someone to want to buy a painting. But the first drawing salon changed everything. I could feel the room shift. They came back week after week. I watched them improve, gain confidence, surprise themselves. They told me, "this is my weekly solace."  They said, “no other place felt like this one did”. And something unexpected happened in return: the more I held the door open for others, the more I learned to see my own work. 

I am an artist who offers a space and guidance because it makes me a better artist, and I build spaces where people discover something in themselves they didn't know was there.

I have spent twenty-six years proving (to myself most of all) that I belong in this field. The Atelier is not a pivot or a plan B. It is the convergence of everything I have built, learned, and refused to give up on. 

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Can't wait to see you here!

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Fondly, 

Michele Ann Murtaugh

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