Tai-Shan Schierenberg - Untutled Landscape

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."

Giovanni Battista Piranesi - Carceri Plate IV - The Smoking fire

 

 

 

 

Giovanni Battista Piranesi

 

                Subject matter

                CARCERI PLATE IV - The smoking fire

 

        The Prisons (Carceri d'invenzione or 'Imaginary Prisons') is a series of 16 prints produced in first and second states that show enormous subteranean vaults with stairs and mighty machines. The artwork, in my opinion, gives the impresion of solitude, of spirit trapped, chaos, but at the same time perfection. It is confusing, chaotic yet perfectly ordered.

          "The smoking fire" generates contradictory feelings like fear and fascination. I think that each of Piranesi Prison can make the viewer feel lost or trapped, trying to figure the way out.

          Unlike a typical capriccio, these weren't created to appeal to the Grand Tourist and fully expressed the imagination of the artist rather than being based on well known monuments.

 

 

                    Technique

 

        The fourteen plates of the Carceri, described on their title page as "capricious inventions," are probably Piranesi's best-known series. These structures, their immensity emphasized by the low viewpoint and the small size of the figures, derive from stage prisons rather than real ones—Piranesi had created an earlier prison fantasy (in his Prima Parte - First Part) that is closely based on stage designs by Ferdinando Bibiena and Filippo Juvarra. Spatial anomalies and ambiguities abound in all the images of the series; they were not meant to be logical but to express the vastness and strength that Piranesi experienced in contemplating Roman architecture, to which he remained in thrall throughout his life. While elaborate theories have been developed to account for this series, it has also been plausibly suggested that Piranesi chose an architectural subject devoid of ornament and requiring little detail or textural differentiation, so that he could isolate the issues of perspective and spatial structure. In this series of variations on a theme, Piranesi attacked his copperplates with a boldness and spontaneity unmatched in any other work of his time. One of his goals seems to have been a thorough exploration of the tools and techniques of the etching medium.

          In "The smoking fire", he used both burin and etching needle to scrape and scratch lines of every depth and width, while the burnisher was used to soften lines and create lighter patches. He created areas of gray throughout the plate by means of shallow surface scratches that held a light film of ink. In other places he applied acid directly to the plate in order to roughen it, resulting in scattered black spots. The brightest highlight of the print has been achieved by adding a resistant ground to an isolated spot before inking the plate—the ground covers any etched lines in that area, as well as accidental scratches, so that the area prints a pure white in the midst of a wide range of blacks and grays.

 

                  

            Artist's career

 

          Piranesi was born in Mogliano Veneto, near Treviso, then part of the Republic of Venice. His brother, Andrea introduced him to Latin and the ancient civilization, and later he studied as an architect under his uncle, Matteo Lucchesi, who was Magistrato delle Acque, a Venetian engineer who specialized in excavation.

          From 1740 he was in Rome with Marco Foscarini, the Venetian envoy to the Vatican. He resided in the Palazzo Venezia and studied under Giuseppe Vasi, who introduced him to the art of etching and engraving. After his studies with Vasi, he collaborated with pupils of the French Academy in Rome to produce a series of vedute (views) of the city; his first work was Prima parte di Architettura e Prospettive (1743), followed in 1745 by Varie Vedute di Roma Antica e Moderna.

          From 1743 to 1747 he sojourned mainly in Venice where, according to some sources, he frequented Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. He then returned to Rome, where he opened a workshop in Via del Corso. In 1748–1774 he created a long series of vedute of the city which established his fame. In the meantime Piranesi devoted himself to the measurement of many of the ancient edifices: this led to the publication of Antichità Romane de' tempo della prima Repubblica e dei primi imperatori ("Roman Antiquities of the Time of the First Republic and the First Emperors"). In 1761 he became a member of the Accademia di San Luca and opened a printing facility of his own. In 1762 the Campo Marzio dell'antica Roma collection of engravings was printed.

          The following year he was commissioned by Pope Clement XIII to restore the choir of San Giovanni in Laterano, but the work did not materialize. In 1764 Piranesi started his sole architectural works of importance, the restoration of the church of Santa Maria del Priorato in the Villa of the Knights of Malta in Rome, where he was buried after his death, in a tomb designed by Giuseppi Angelini.

In 1767 he was created a knight of the Golden Spur, which enabled him henceforth to sign himself "Cav[aliere] Piranesi". In 1769 his publication of a series of ingenious and sometimes bizarre designs for chimneypieces, as well as an original range of furniture pieces, established his place as a versatile and resourceful designer.[1] In 1776 he created his famous Piranesi Vase, his best known work as a 'restorer' of ancient sculpture. In 1777–78 Piranesi published Avanzi degli Edifici di Pesto, (Remains of the Edifices of Paestum) a collection of views of Paestum.

He died in Rome in 1778 after a long illness and buried in the Church of Santa Maria del Priorato, on the Aventine hill in Rome.

          Considering this work was created in the mid-eighteenth century, this is a far cry from the lighthearted and decorative Rococo style which was now in favor.

This series of etchings went on to influence many other artists such as the Romanticism movement, the Surrealists and M.C. Escher to name a few.  Piranesi's other works of art are among my favorites, but it is this series that sets him apart from other artists of his time.

                   

 

                   Links with own work

  The Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, Prima parte di Architettura e Prospettive, Veduta della Piazza di Monte Cavallo, The Piazza del Quirinale, Veduta dell insigne Basilica Vaticana coll’ ampio Portico, e Piazza adjacente, Veduta del Porto di Ripetta, Varie Vedute di Roma Antica e Moderna, Carceri : The Sawhorse, Prima Parte di Architetture, e Prospettive inventate, Catalogo Delle Opere date finora alla luce da Gio-Battista Piranesi, The Piazza Navona with S. Agnese on the Right

                Quotations

 

        Thomas De Quincey in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1820) wrote the following:

 

        "Many years ago, when I was looking over Piranesi's Antiquities of Rome, Mr. Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by that artist ... which record the scenery of his own visions during the delirium of a fever: some of them (I describe only from memory of Mr. Coleridge's account) representing vast Gothic halls, on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery, wheels, cables, pulleys, levers, catapults, etc., etc., expressive of enormous power put forth, and resistance overcome. Creeping along the sides of the walls, you perceived a staircase; and upon it, groping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little further, and you perceive it come to a sudden abrupt termination, without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him."

 

        An in-depth analysis of Piranesi's Carceri was written by Marguerite Yourcenar in her Dark Brain of Piranesi: and Other Essays (1984).

        Further discussion of Piranesi and the Carceri can be found in The Mind and Art of Giovanni Battista Piranesi by John Wilton-Ely (1978).

        The style of Piranesi was imitated by 20th-century forger Eric Hebborn.