Michael George Strom
AKA Danton Thorne
Born 1948
Astoria, Oregon
Born in the Northwest Mike Strom was exposed to the beauty of nature from his earliest years. He followed his family throughout the Western United States as his father, a carpentry contractor, followed the big projects in pursuit of the American dream. This constant traveling instilled a sense of wanderlust in the artist who spread his wings and traveled the dream of finding America in his youth and later expanded his experience base with trips to the Orient and Middle-East.
Art was to be his mistress, at first with poetry then with fiction and sports and travel writing. In his early twenties he started painting though most of these works are lost. He did not seriously pursue painting until the mid-1970s when he painted in Port Townsend, Washington. But the theft of his entire collection in 1979 left him without a show and he drifted into writing his second novel, Boho Living. This chronicled a commune in Port Townsend that owned a bar and deli. Later he painted a series of oil paintings that he later burned in a drunken frenzy over a love affair gone bad in his first gallery, Port Townsend’s Uptown Gallery.
Driven nearly insane by rejection he traveled in his beat-up ’67 Ford Falcon to Aspen, Colorado where he worked on a billionaire's mansion as a carpenter and painted and washed away the memories of his lost love in a combination of Colorado Kool-Aid and Martinis while discovering the beauty of the high alpine mountains in Marble, Colorado where he met sculptors of uncommon skill and dedication.
From Colorado he traveled to Wyoming where he met a barmaid of uncommon beauty and drove one nail out with another. When a rejected suitor of hers blew his brains out one night when he was out drinking at all-night clubs with her, he left town… and went to the Cascades outside of Yakima. Then it all became a blur… the Navy years, New York City, two more novels, the beautiful Irena, fishing in Alaska, and finally settling down in the town where he was born, Astoria, Oregon where he opened Gallery 12 and where he lives the life of the artist he’d always dreamed of being.
