Tai-Shan Schierenberg
Untitled Landscape
Subject matter
Born in England in 1962, Tai-Shan Schierenberg lives and works in London. He graduated from the Slade School of Art in 1987 and has been in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States, United Kingdom and Europe. He's best known as a painter of portraits.
In my opinion, this landscape it is a metaphore to enlighten the psychological and philosophical questions that concern both the artist and the viewer. The artwork combines feelings like joy, melancholy, passion, the force of life generated by the bright colours with fear, tragedy and unsecurity that cover the light of the sun above the earth.
The idea that this landscape reveals is Schierenberg's concern for society reflected in nature.
Technique
For years, Tai-Shan Schierenberg painted landscapes for what they are; light on many different surfaces near and far, enjoying the recreation of an airy cloud or heavy clod of plowed earth, in paint and mind
He treats the paint almost as if it were flesh, and it is this technique that establishes the major paradoxes characteristic of his work. It is both abstract and realist; edgy and sensitive; grand and inconclusive; violent and melancholic; physically intense and aesthetically detached.
Comparisons to Lucian Freud are inevitable, and he has been criticized for doing what Freud does, but simply scaled up. It’s pretty hard to deny the similarity, though there is a distinct atmosphere to Schierenberg’s work. They seem a bit more joyful, a bit less harsh in their representation. Personally, I think comparison to Freud can only be a good thing, and Schierenberg’s work does not suffer for lack of originality, as its sincerity seems perfectly clear.
Artist's career
Schierenberg was born in 1962 in Skegness, England to a Chinese mother and German father, also a painter.
Being taken on frequent visits to the London Museums or art galleries made him familiar with painting of all realms and ages, while drawing soon became the child's favourite activity.
After extensive travels to the places of Antiquity in Greece and Asia Minor, the family settled in the Black Forest and, in pursuit of a more ecologically centered life, did some subsistence farming, while the boy, by now eleven years old, started his secondary education under the auspices of a Jesuit run grammar school nearby. In his mid-teens the first cautious steps towards oil painting were undertaken.
At the age of seventeen and with his secondary education completed, he left home, reconnoitred Frankfurt and Amsterdam, drifted over to Paris, where he predominantly spent his time drawing from life at the venerable Académie de Grande Chaumière.
Schierenberg eventually returned to London, where he has remained ever since. He applied to and was accepted by St. Martin's and in due course, Slade School of Art for postgraduate studies, which he finished in 1987.
He studied at St Martin's and the Slade Schools of Art and came to prominence in 1989 when he won the John Player Portrait Award with a painting of his wife, artist Lynn Dennison.
As part of the John Player prize he was commissioned to paint the portrait of writer and barrister John Mortimer for the National Portrait Gallery in London. The NPG also holds his portraits of Lord Carrington (1994) and most recently Lord Sainsbury (2002).
Important Sitters include, Her Majesty the Queen, His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh, John Mortimer, Seamus Heaney, Lord Sainsbury, Lord Carrington, Duke of Devonshire, Duchess of Westminster and Professor Stephen Hawkin.
Links with own work
Portrait of Stephen Hawking, Portrait of Peter Alexander Rupert Carrington, 6th Baron Carrington, Portrait of Natalia Phillips Duchess of Westminster, Road to Damascus, The girl, Portrait of John Davan Sainsbury, Baron Sainsbury of Preston Candover, Portrait of John Mortimer, Portrait of Seamus Heaney, Her Majesty the Queen with Prince Philip, The Emigre
Quotations
Tai- Shan Schierenberg in an interview:
"I really love the yumminess of paint, I love manipulating and seeing what it can do and the accidents that occur. It often helps a painting to have a medium like that that can suggest things that I would have never imagined or I could never have thought of or done as a logical progression in my technique. As a painter sometimes accidents happen and the paint oozes out of the back of the brush in a slightly different colour which suggest a different light, a different facet of the face. And the possibilities are endless. It’s a great ally to have paint, when one’s painting, it sounds obvious but it’s so malleable."
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