Michael Patrick Farmer

Michael Patrick Farmer makes art to challenge assumptions. Moving between oil painting, collage, assemblage, and graphic imagery, he develops bodies of work around the social and philosophical questions occupying him at a particular moment. His practice has changed substantially over time, but its underlying purpose has remained consistent: to engage viewers intellectually and emotionally, and to make reflection difficult to avoid.

Farmer grew up in a family of educators. His father was a mathematics professor, while his mother worked first as an elementary school teacher and later as a librarian. Education was central to family life, though original art was not financially accessible. Prints by M.C. Escher hung throughout the house, providing an early encounter with images that united visual precision and conceptual inquiry.

Farmer began drawing as a child. In the third grade, he copied a Leonardo da Vinci self-portrait with the same enthusiasm he brought to reproducing images from his Peanuts bedsheets. The accuracy of these drawings surprised his family and friends, establishing art as an ability others recognized in him before he understood how it might shape his life.

A family trip to Washington, D.C., during the sixth grade proved more decisive. Seeing works by Salvador Dalí and René Magritte in person initiated what Farmer describes as a lifelong devotion to Surrealism. His mother purchased as many calendars and posters as they could carry home, allowing those images to remain present long after the museum visit.

He initially chose to study filmmaking because he did not believe painting could provide a dependable career. On his nineteenth birthday, however, his father gave him one hundred dollars. Farmer went directly to an art store, purchased oil-painting supplies, and began teaching himself.

Painting continued alongside his official education and later employment. After completing his degree and spending a short period in Hollywood, he abandoned his plans to write and direct feature films. Painting was the constant. “I always made room for it and always made time for it,” he recalls.

For approximately twenty years, Farmer described himself as a self-taught hobbyist while maintaining a day job. In 2015, he decided to approach his practice more seriously. He enrolled in evening courses at a community college to study traditional techniques, rented studio space, and began entering group exhibitions. Those two years of classes remain the extent of his formal visual arts training, but they provided a technical foundation from which he could build. His work has since been exhibited at the Phoenix Art Museum and Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum.

For much of his creative life, Farmer worked almost exclusively as an oil-on-canvas Surrealist. That commitment began to shift in 2017 after the death of a cat his sister had adopted while living in Africa. Returning to his customer-service job after the funeral, he found himself thinking about mortality and searching for perspectives on the meaning of life.

The experience led to Technology Will Save Us All, a series that departed sharply from his earlier paintings. Combining collage, assemblage, and black-and-white graphic imagery, the work examines the relationship between contemporary technological systems and religious traditions and moral frameworks developed over millennia.

The series altered more than Farmer’s choice of materials. It changed how he understood the boundaries of his practice. Once he abandoned the expectation that his ideas had to fit oil paint and canvas, mixed media became available as both a formal language and a method of argument.

“From that point forward, the gloves were off,” he says. “I no longer restricted myself to canvas and paint.”

Farmer began working more freely across forms and subjects. His discovery of Joan Mitchell’s work contributed to this expansion and eventually informed his current series, The American Disease, which addresses gun violence in the United States and the culture that sustains it.

The subjects of Farmer’s work frequently correspond to the environments in which he is employed. Technology Will Save Us All developed while he worked in customer relations for an internet company, responding daily to technical problems and the frustrations they produced. After changing careers and becoming a high school art teacher, his attention turned toward gun violence, particularly mass shootings in schools.

This relationship between employment and artistic subject matter is not calculated in advance. Rather, the conditions of his daily life establish the questions that follow him into the studio. Work becomes a field of observation, exposing him to the systems and anxieties that later emerge through visual form.

Although each series has a distinct theme, Farmer’s philosophical orientation connects them. He is interested in the assumptions that structure contemporary life, especially those that have become so familiar they appear inevitable. His work attempts to unsettle that familiarity.

“I want to stimulate both their brain and their heart,” he says of his audience. “If I’m lucky, my art may change the way someone views the world.”

Farmer sets a demanding standard for what art might accomplish, but he does not consider behavioral change the only measure of effectiveness. If a viewer pauses briefly to consider their own position within the world, he regards the work as successful. The pause itself interrupts passive consumption and creates space for another interpretation.

His decision to maintain employment outside the art market has been central to preserving this approach. Farmer does not depend upon sales to support himself and sees that independence as a form of creative protection. Because the work does not need to satisfy domestic preferences or function comfortably as decoration, he can pursue subjects that may be unsettling, politically charged, or difficult to place.

“The value is in the ideas it expresses,” he explains.

This position reflects both Farmer’s upbringing and his professional experience. He did not grow up knowing artists who supported themselves exclusively through their work, and the economic model of a full-time studio practice never appeared inevitable to him. Maintaining another career allows him to speak directly without expecting each piece to provide financial security.

His work is therefore oriented toward public and institutional contexts as much as private ownership. He wants the pieces to circulate, be encountered, and find lasting homes, even when their content makes them unsuitable for conventional domestic display. Their purpose is not neutrality. They are made to enter spaces where their ideas can remain active.

Farmer’s account of artistic persistence is similarly direct. He distinguishes between a temporary interest in art and a compulsion that repeatedly returns, regardless of interruptions. An artist may experience fallow periods, but the practice eventually reasserts itself.

“Artists can’t stop,” he says. “No matter how long their fallow periods, they pick it up again.”

His own career embodies that return. Painting survived film school, Hollywood, customer service, and years in which art remained secondary to paid employment. It later expanded beyond painting itself, becoming more conceptually and materially open. What appeared for years to be a private constant gradually became a sustained public practice.

Farmer now has more ideas than he expects to complete. Multiple series and possible directions compete for the time available to him. Rather than treating this excess as a frustration, he regards it as evidence that the practice remains active. He is confident that he will not exhaust his material or reach a point at which there is nothing left to investigate.

This abundance also complicates the idea of completion. Each series may reach a point of resolution, but Farmer’s broader practice continues through shifts in employment, social conditions, personal experience, and artistic influence. A new concern may require a different material, visual structure, or degree of confrontation.

His hope is that the work will move outward. He wants the pieces dispersed, valued, and placed where they can continue affecting viewers. The destination matters less than the possibility that the work will remain visible and intellectually present beyond the studio.

Farmer’s practice does not offer art as withdrawal from contemporary life. It treats art as a way of entering its contradictions more fully. Technology, religion, mortality, violence, labor, and institutional power become subjects through which familiar structures can be examined again.

The resulting works are not designed to resolve the questions they raise. Their function is to make those questions harder to ignore.