BIOGRAPHY

Michael Schliefke is a working artist living in Austin, Texas since 2002.  Born in Schenectady, New York and raised in the Northeast on a steady diet of Warner Bros. cartoons, game shows, and infomercials, Michael realized at a young age chance and luck would play a large part in his life.  He moved west at age 18 and graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute with a Bachelor's of Fine Arts in Painting in 1997.

After college, he went back to the northeast and balanced time painting with a day job touching up mass produced decorative landscape paintings from China.  He rode out the dotcom boom by falling into a job at a tech company that eventually sent him to live and work in Cork, Ireland for a year. He also found the time to travel throughout Europe on a number of monthlong breaks, spending lots of time in Eastern Europe as well as trekking through every musuem he came across.

Chance guided his fate as he ended up in Austin, Texas and decided not to leave.  He set up shop at a vacant space at Nathan Jensen's ArtHive studio complex, and began to paint and show around town.  He then moved his studio into Blue Genie Art, where he teamed up with fellow painter Chris Chappell and began to put together small group painting exhibitions.

A participant of the East Austin Studio Tour, Michael moved into a live-work space at Bolm Studios and began teaching painting classes and continuing to show his own work.  Alongside Ian Shults, the two put together 2005's Unicorn Art Show, which featured 60 Austin artists and was named The Best Group Show. (Austin Chronicle)  Ian and Michael continued to put together various group shows, including Gallery Lombardi's Radical Nautical and the two day, two gallery 'Biblical Proportions' show in 2009.  

Once again, Michael's work shifted into a different gear when on a whim he took a year off from painting and worked on the Tales of the Really White Vigilante, which would be the start of a new path for a few years.  A comic book satire about the gentrification of East Austin, with a quixotic 'superhero' decked out in a Mexican wrestling costume trying to stop the seemingly endless changes to the face of East Austin.

Michael continues to paint and draw, and teach classes on the side from his studio.  He detests the term 'starving artist' and enjoys the time he spends working on his projects.  He lives in East Austin and stays busy reading about ancient history and doing his best to avoid watching movies at all costs.