Background

Ethnicity: Tai-Shan Schierenberg's father is German and his mother is Chineese.

Tai-Shan Schierenberg was born in 1962 in the United Kingdom. He is a first-born to a painter from Germany and to a woman from China. Schierenberg has two younger brothers.

Education

Tai-Shan Schierenberg lived in Malaysia with his grandparents while a child. Then he came back to London where he entered a primary school.

Schierenberg discovered the art of the great masters visiting galleries and museums of the city. Before long, the boy developed a passion for drawing.

When his family relocated to the Black Forest, Germany Schierenberg entered there a secondary Jesuit grammar school in 1973. After graduation, Tai-Shan Schierenberg traveled around Europe for a while, including Paris where he practiced his drawing skills at Académie de la Grande Chaumière.

Then, Schierenberg pursued his artistic training at Saint Martin's School of Art. In 1987, he graduated from the Slade School of Art.

Career

Tai-Shan Schierenberg emerged to the art scene at the end of the 1980s. One of his first great commissions became the one from the National Portrait Gallery to portray a playwright John Mortimer. Since then, the artist has created the portraits of other notable personalities including the Royal Couple, Stephen Hawking, Lord Justice Fulford, and Sebastian Faulks еo name a few.

Nowadays, the artist shares his time between London, Norfolk and the Black Forest, Germany. He serves as the head of the painting department at The Art Academy in London.

The representative of Schierenberg’s art in the United Kingdom is the Angela Flowers Gallery.

Achievements

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  Tai-Shan Schierenberg is an accomplished artist praised for his ability to disclose the truthful emotions of people he depicts on his canvases.
  
  Schierenberg’s talent has been marked by such awards as the Boite Postale Portrait Award, the Ondaatje Prize for Portraiture at The Royal Society of Portrait Painters, and the First Prize at the National Portrait Gallery Awards.
  
  His art is acquired by a variety of major art spaces like the National Portrait Gallery, Tate Gallery, the Royal Society, Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and others.
  
  In 2019, ‘Norfolk Landscape’ by Schierenberg was purchased at Sotheby's in London for $8,031.

Works

More photos

• painting

  • Brothers

  • The Romance of Violence

  • Wanderer Before a Sea of Fog

  • No Man Left Behind

  • Saturday Night Fever

  • Turning into Our Fathers

  • The Ascent of Man

  • Father and Son

  • Divine Comedy

  • Selfportrait as Janus

  • Mass - Tree

  • Unnatural

  • Extrovert / Introvert Diptych

  • Marsyas

  • That Obscure Object of Desire

  • Death and The Maiden

  • The Narrow Road

  • Winterreise

  • Wanderer

  • Gods Ourselves

  • The Apostles

  • Derwent Water

  • Black Forest

  • Seamus Heaney, Nobel Laureate

  • HM The Queen and HRH Prince Philip

  • John Mortimer

  • Professor Stephen Hawking

Views

Quotations: "Painting and painting and painting, endlessly exploring ideas in paint on canvas, always painting my way. Finding that over time I can't see the trees for the paint. Sometimes its good to try a new way, a different path, expose oneself to the vagaries of chance – and see the trees again."

"Men don’t like being shown in any way vulnerable. Often when they’re sitting they will try and sell themselves to me, to list their achievements. They’re worried that I might see something they don’t want me to see, which can cause a bit of a power struggle. Men are often very proud of their scars and their frowns, and they don’t mind showing that stuff, whereas if you show that in a woman’s portrait she’d be very upset. Women sometimes cry when I’m painting them, men sometimes get angry."

Connections

Tai-Shan Schierenberg is married to an artist Lynn Dennison.

Wife:

Lynn Dennison

References

• Tai Shan Schierenberg's Official Website
• Tai-Shan Schierenberg
  2005