MICHAEL SCHLIEPER

"Michael Schlieper is one of those artists who plot a solitary course in Australian art. Whether he is painting the landscape, an urban scene or something that might be termed a “conversation piece”, he employs the same fierce intensity of concentration, the same love of mood and detail. His work has echoes of painters such as Jeffrey Smart and William Delafield-Cook, but one could never mistake his pictures for theirs. There is a kind of residual melancholy in Schlieper’s paintings. Looking at one of his landscapes we might feel that we are the only living beings within coo-ee.

There are no tourists or locals in these deadpan depictions of the bush. His scenes are at once familiar and strange – familiar because they contain so many typical features of the Australian countryside; strange because there is an air of expectancy. Surely something is about to happen? Schlieper’s pictures are like film stills, waiting to be animated by the arrival of actors and a plot.

If we were to accept Arthur Streeton’s account, Australian landscape painting began when he and his friends made those sun-filled views of the outskirts of Melbourne, using high-keyed colours and a square tipped brush. Schlieper’s compositions share some of the casualness of the Impressionists, but the precise realism of his work takes us back to times when artists were primarily concerned to depict what they saw rather than what they felt. His paintings reflect a conviction that if a painter takes care of the facts, the feeling will take care of itself."

John McDonald, Sydney Morning Herald Art Critic. 2007

Michael Schlieper (1947-2015)

Michael was born in 1947, in the small Bavarian town of Brannenburg, near to where our family had fled the allied bombings during the war. The family emigrated to Australia when Michael was 10. He went straight into school, speaking very little English and that, with a thick German accent.

After finishing high school, he spent a couple of years at The Sydney Telegraph, working as a copy boy, then cadet journalist in the racing section. This period gave birth to his lifelong "interest" in horse racing, an interest that was later to sustain him through the early years of artistic penury. 

After a brief stint, he left The Telegraph to attend Alexander Mackie teachers college,  not only to do some serious "study" but also in an attempt to avoid conscription into the Vietnam War. In the event, most of his study was done in the pubs of Taylor Square, but he nonetheless graduated with a dipED and was promptly packed off to Bathurst High to do his mandatory practical teaching year.

Until his time in Bathurst, his painting had been in two distinct modes. One was quite figurative and heavily influenced by German expressionism, the other was totally abstract, albeit extremely controlled and almost geometrical in its rigour. But during his time in Bathurst, he completely fell in love with the Australian bush, particularly the sandstone of NSW and the gums that live in symbiosis with it. The landscapes that formed the vast majority of his later output in oils, can be traced  back to this year.  Meanwhile, his largely self-taught technical facility had grown to the point where he could seemlessly restore old paintings and on one occasion he indistinguishably reproduced an 18th century portrait for a well-heeled client who wanted a second one for their other home.

 In parallel,  he produced many fine pen and ink drawings, which would typically constitute  about half of the works in his exhibitions. Although large (around A1 in size)  these drawings are minutely detailed. They were drawn with a tiny 0.13 technical drafting pen and are of enormous richness and complexity. They constitute musings on all manner of things - sociological, metaphysical and philosophical. Though generally serious in nature, many of them also betray his whimsical sense of humour.

In 2007, Michael was diagnosed with Fronto-Temporal Dementia, a fairly rare "early onset" form of the disease. It is thought he'd been suffering from it for up to 10 years already, at the time of being diagnosed. He ceased to be able to paint for the whole of 2007, but then rallied and in a superhuman feat of "mind over mind" he managed to produce one last, full exhibition for 2009. The final one of these paintings remains unfinished to this day.