Schofield was born in Florida 1947, but his family moved to California that same year. He began to paint and study watercolor in high school. Like most teenage boys, he was at first much more interested in sports than in fine art, but his art teacher at Oakland High School recognized that Michael had an exceptional talent, and for nearly two years he tutored the youth privately. After a stint in the military, Schofield went to art school in Nashville, Tennessee. During the summers he would journey to Woodstock, New York, in order to study with watercolorist John Pike, an esteemed member of the National Academy of Art and the American Watercolor Society.

Schofield soon opened his own art studio, where he painted and taught for more than a decade. He returned to California in 1980 to set up a silk-screen printing studio in order to be able to create his own original serigraphs. He wanted to be involved in every step of the intricate and exacting process of serigraph, from fabricating the stencils to adding the final finishing touches of color.

Having been a successful artist for many years, Schofield has his works in numerous private and corporate collections, including the Bank of America, the Library of Congress, the Xerox Corporation, Occidental, and Twentieth Century, Inc.

Schofield believes that the primary aspiration of art is to communicate a shared perception of beauty from one human heart to another, from the artist to the viewer of his art: I choose to create more traditional landscapes because they involved imagery most people can relate to, imagery that evokes a memory and therefore a feeling. I painting landscapes because they speak to everyone. In sharing a place I have known, I know that others will see places they have known. In that way, I can communicate with others without using a single word.