Tim Schiffer was raised on a ranch in northern Wyoming. His interest in art was encouraged by his mother, who studied at the Art Students League in New York, and who introduced him to watercolors. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy, and studied for a year in Rennes, France. He received his BA in art from Yale, and attended the Yale Summer School of Music and Art in Norfolk, Connecticut. He earned his MFA in painting from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where for eight years he was a lecturer in art and gallery director at the College of Creative Studies, an independent undergraduate program within the university. In 1993 he was named curator at the Museum of Ventura County in Ventura, California, and went on to serve as executive director from 1999 to 2012. In 2012 he joined the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa, as executive director, retiring in 2019. He lives in Tucson, Arizona. "I work from life, using transparent watercolor on Arches paper. I usually spend several days making drawings before I settle on a final arrangement, which I then draw and transfer onto watercolor paper. From there I build up the painting in layers, developing the interplay of dark and light and the color relationships as I go. Any white areas left in the final piece are the white of the paper, as I don’t use white paint. I enjoy the challenge of creating a “realistic” rendering of the subject while also exploring the interplay between the flat design and the illusion of space and light. I choose the artworks I include in the paintings partly for their role in the composition, but also for the stories they add to the painting. Sometimes the images are related in ways that I only see as the painting progresses."