Michael Tine was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1944. His father taught social work and later ran a senior citizens’ center; his mother, after raising three sons, took her own degrees and became a social worker. The family moved with his father’s work, from Cambridge to Shorewood, outside Milwaukee, when he was about six, and on to Nashville, Tennessee, when he was about ten.
Nashville is where the first idea of a vocation took hold, and it was not art. In the attic of his grandparents’ house in Massachusetts were the things his uncles had carried home from the Second World War, four of whom had served, two in the Pacific and two in Europe. Among them were back issues of the Marine Corps magazine Leatherneck, which followed the Pacific campaign island by island. “That got me so excited about being a Marine that I never let go of that,” he has said. At eighteen he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and served four years, including one year in Vietnam as an intelligence and intercept operator. He left the Marines in 1966, proud of the service and, by his own account, done with it: “When I became an artist, I put those things aside and focused on creativity.”
He came to art late, and sideways. Back in Nashville he worked for a year, then enrolled at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 1967. He started in anthropology, moved to philosophy, and fell hardest for existentialism. “As an existentialist, you live every day for that day and you live for yourself, and that in itself to me was a creative endeavor.” By 1968 he had decided he wanted to be an artist. He has described the turn plainly: from philosophy, which is “cerebral, rational, dialectical,” to “the symbolic knowledge that we carry in our heads,” with, in his words, “a little help with some psychedelics” that made him pay attention to the images running through his mind. He was about twenty-five.
He earned a BFA in Painting at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. It was not a tidy passage. By his own account there was a stretch where he was, as he put it, “bored by being bored,” and during it he rented a studio and started carving wood. That detour is the thing that lasted: it began the sculpture, alongside a painting practice he has now kept for more than fifty years, started at twenty-five and never put down.
Years later he returned to school deliberately, for a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture at the University of Wyoming, in Laramie. The art department there had been built by a sculptor of real reputation, who retired the year Michael arrived but received the new students at his home before he left. The program was rigorous and, importantly, paid: an assistantship covered tuition in exchange for teaching, so Michael taught figure drawing and sculpture and learned the tools of the trade from the other side of the room. He completed the MFA in 1985.
He wanted, after school, to work in a major art city, and the practical version of that was Los Angeles, chosen partly for the weather: “It’s winter in L.A. when you have to wear a long sleeve shirt to the beach.” He was poor and expected to stay that way, and he made his living with his hands, as a carpenter and fabricator, while he kept painting. Los Angeles was a hard, formative stretch, lived in the downtown arts district and later Long Beach.
The move that mattered came through a single block of stone. While in Long Beach he took a commission for a nearly life-size marble figure for a client who had been moved by the statuary she saw in Europe. Hunting for the right marble took him up the coast to Art City Studios in Ventura, where he found a piece of white marble that would work. The block weighed something like eight hundred pounds. As he tells it, the arithmetic was simple: easier to move himself to Ventura than to move the stone to Long Beach. He arrived broke and worked off the rent on a studio space. The owner and master sculptor at Art City was Paul Lindhard.
Ventura held. He has worked there for more than seventeen years, now out of WAV, Working Artists Ventura, in Building 175, Studio 108, and at Art City Studios. The work is figurative and cut by hand, hammer and chisel, mostly in marble, also limestone, alabaster, travertine, and soapstone. He likes to work big and he likes the physical fact of it. At the time of the interview he put it this way: “I’m eighty-two years old but I’m still in pretty good shape,” and he intends to keep using his body for the work as long as it will let him.
There are two bodies of work, and he treats them differently. The sculpture is for sale and he takes commissions. The paintings, more than fifty years of them, he will not sell. His reasoning is not commercial and he states it without hedging: “Art belongs to everybody. Once you own it, you can do anything you want with it. You can tear it up. You can throw it away. You can use it to wallpaper your chicken house.” He intends to keep the painting archive intact and give it, whole, to an institution or benefactor who will show it.
He also teaches, which he came to honestly through the assistantship in Wyoming and never left behind. He teaches stone carving at American Jewish University, at the Whizin Center, and at the Skirball Cultural Center through the Nazarian Fine Arts program.
Asked, in one form or another, what the work is for, he has tended to answer with a phrase he likes: art is philosophy by other means. He arrived at art through ideas, and he has never entirely left them. The pieces are the argument.