Michael Masters is an associate professor of Anthropology at Montana Tech in Butte, Montana, and actively pursues other forms of creative expression in music and visual art. He began painting and drawing while working at the Ohio University School of Art, and was given the opportunity to study figurative and abstract art from a retired painting and printmaking professor in the department, where he began experimenting with various oil and acrylic techniques at his studio in Athens, Ohio.

Michael has been commissioned to create drawings of natural features and past hominin artifacts for the book Sparing Nature, to draw maps of the Curu Wildlife Preserve in Costa Rica for primate conservation research efforts, to make life-like paintings of people’s pets, and to paint a large mural in a lodge on Snowmass Mountain near Aspen, Colorado.

More recently, his work has shifted away from realism and toward a more fantastical utilization of color and movement. This recent work, primarily undertaken using watercolor and acrylic paint, continues to draw inspiration from nature, but with a form that allows for more freedom of movement, depth, and expression.