Michael Tine is a figurative stone sculptor and painter who works in Ventura, California. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1944, he came to art at twenty-five, by way of philosophy rather than art school, and has painted for more than fifty years and carved stone for about forty.
He served four years in the United States Marine Corps, including a year in Vietnam, before turning to art. He earned a BFA in Painting at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and an MFA in Sculpture at the University of Wyoming, Laramie, in 1985.
The sculpture is figurative and cut by hand, hammer and chisel, mostly in marble, with limestone, alabaster, travertine, and soapstone. He works at scale and likes the physical fact of the work. He sells sculpture and accepts commissions. He does not sell his paintings: he intends to keep the body of painting work intact and give it to an institution or benefactor who will show it. As he puts it, “Art belongs to everybody.”
He works out of WAV, Working Artists Ventura, and Art City Studios in Ventura, and has done so for more than seventeen years. He teaches stone carving at American Jewish University and at the Skirball Cultural Center.
He describes what he does as “philosophy by other means.” He came to the work through ideas and has never quite left them; the pieces are where the thinking goes.