Meet Martin, Artist and Master Modeler

My goal is to create agricultural dioramas of incredible realism, that capture the richness of the American farm experience in miniature.

Drawing on my lifelong occupation as a farmer, I am uniquely suited to faithfully re-create the true essence of the American farm experience in miniature scales. I specialize in crafting models and scenes that highlight the time worn, rusted, weathered, and often neglected side of life on the farm. I find beauty and richness in the abandoned and isolated vistas of the once vast empire of the traditional family farms. In my work, I strive to accurately capture the intricate details of the interactions of man, machine, land and rural architecture.

Artist Bio

Like many farmers, I have always had an off-farm job. As a retired marketing and design executive, I have been emersed in color, layout, writing and design for 40 years. I am fortunate to be able to bring my years of professional design experience to my art. Having also proudly farmed full time my entire adult life, I find myself in the unique position to blend agriculture and art, with the keen insight having lived in both worlds.

I take my artistic inspiration from Andrew Wyeth, Eric Sloan, Thomas Hart Benton and artist of the school of Midwest regionalism like Grand Wood, John Steward Currie and Marvin Cone.

I often find myself obsessed with attempting to capture the quickly disappearing artifacts of the past American farm experience. I am never without a camera or sketchbook. I write visceral and raw farm poetry that centers on the human cost of farming, the side the non-farm community never sees or understands. I create my dioramas and write from a real base of understanding the joys and heartbreaks of working the land. My creative writing inspiration comes from, Robert Frost, Ronald Jager, Jerry Apps, Paul Engle, Verlyn Klinkenborg and Willa Cather just to name a few.

I farm and create my art in Michigan where I feel the weight of decayed barns falling in, of houses devouring former corn, bean and hay fields, of my old farmer friends leaving the land and leaving this world. They take with them the reverence of what it meant to live with the land, they take their rural wisdom, their stalwart stoicism, they take their connections to me. My art is a race to capture the decaying beauty of the agricultural testaments they left behind, before they vanish forever.

I live and work in Michigan, with my wife Shannon, and two German pointers of questionable ability, Jetts and Blitzen. When not working I might be found hunting grouse behind the dogs, or angling for trout in the wilds of northern Michigan.