Breast Cancer Awareness - Michael Tieman - Courage For Cancer

Michael Tieman was born in a small town in Iowa in 1950, but his family moved every few years around the mid-western states. Thanks to the encouragement of his fourth grade school teacher, Michael picked up a charcoal pencil and started to draw. For the next eight years, he filled his evenings and weekends taking art classes to round out his art education, including watercolor and oil painting, sculpture, printmaking, pottery, and his first love drawing.

In 1968 Michael attended the Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus Ohio and in 1972 received his BFA.

Taking his degree, Michael and his Canadian wife Nancy went to Vancouver B.C., Canada where she worked as a dental hygienist and he started out on a successful thirty plus year career in advertising. The years passed quickly with working and raising two wonderful daughters, Heather and Katie.

After completing Expo 86 as the Sr. Graphic Designer, Michael relocated in 1986 to Portland, Oregon with his family. Nancy taught clinical dental hygiene at Oregon Health and Science University while Michael worked in several ad agencies.

In 1993, Michael opened MT Studios in Portland, an outlet for his fine art. In 2001, thanks to the encouragement from his family, Michael put his advertising career on hold and devoted his time and energies toward paintings of the Pacific Northwest’s landscapes, seascapes, and people.

“My work is a combination of all of the techniques I have employed over the last thirty plus years in graphic design and fine art. In painting, I am concentrating on the medium of acrylics on canvas, refining my “early impressionistic” style of thick bold strokes of colors, strong abstract design, movement and texture, impasto over washes, and accents in the primary colors.”

A year later, Michael and his wife Nancy, sold their house and cars, packed up their “kits” and settled on the Oregon Coast in Cannon Beach. Here they opened their own art gallery, Artists Gallerie, a dream Michael had for 30 years. Artists Gallerie was not only an art gallery which represented a dozen artists, but it was also Tieman’s studio.

“The role of an artist from the dawn of time has been as a visual storyteller. The stories my paintings and sculptures tell are ones of confidence, strength, passion, playful sophistication and the celebration of life.”

Following the encouragement of a friend and gallery owner, Michael in 2003 expanded his artistic talents into sculptures cast in bronze. Tieman’s sculptures are unique in that they are a combination of traditional figurative sculpture and his Impressionistic painting style.

“I create my bronze sculpture as a three dimensional painting; texture is the impasto brushstroke, color is the play of light and shadows across the surfaces, and detail is the free style movement of the impressionist style.”

Michael is the artist in residence and showing his paintings and sculptures at Haystack Gallery in Cannon Beach. Nancy is pursuing her education and passion working as a mental health therapist with teenagers in the county.

Tieman is a member of; Pacific Northwest Sculptors, International Sculpture Center, Oregon Society of Artists, and the Cannon Beach Gallery Group – (Board Member since 2002, President-2005 & 2008), and is currently writing a monthly column in the local newspaper.

-Michael Tieman-