Michael Madore, who has Asperger's Syndrome (a form of autism), started to draw maps and diagrams as a child in order to corroborate increasingly specialized interests that began with geography and culminated by the age of twelve with an obsession with office market vacancy rates.

As a teen he took refuge in cartoons, radio playlists, mechanical drawing, and weather statistics. In college he majored in art history, focusing on medieval manuscript illumination and nineteenth century artists/illustrators such as William Dadd, Victor Hugo, and Grandville.

After graduating in 1977, Madore moved to New York where he first began to consciously make "art" while remaining on the periphery of the emerging East Village art scene. He moved to New Haven in 1983 and for nearly a decade he continued to work in relative isolation, teaching himself to paint while meticulously creating and cataloging a world populated by the likes of King Charles (who had the ability to render himself invisible or to take on animal forms), the Sirenians (a quasi scientific/monastic tribe of nervous, absentminded "researchers and sensors"), and innumerable forest, aquatic, and space entities. In 1987, while hospitalized at Yale-New Haven Hospital, he took the advice of his psychiatrist and entered the Yale MFA painting program. After graduating in 1990, Madore moved back to New York where he has continued painting and drawing while working as a medical editor, proofreader, and writer on topics ranging from synesthesia, tics, and ikebana.