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Saturday 4 December 2010

Tai-Shan Schierenberg

The second artist I have looked at is Tai-Shan Schierenberg. Born in England in 1962, the eldest of three sons to a very young Chinese mother and a nascent painter-cum-poet father of Dutch-German origin. He spent the first years of his life with his grandparents in Malaysia but eventually returned to London for primary school, forgetting Chinese and learning English.

I like Schierenberg and in particular this image for reasons similiar to those expressed when I spoke previously of Rembrandt. This is "The Hermit", painted in oils, something I am getting progressively better at. He paints in a similiar way to Rembrandt, but with a more broken up feel to the lights and shados, making the face in this picture feel more weathered and old than in some of Rembrandts' Paintings. The sense of emotion in this painting is quite strong too. Schierenberg is capable of
making his paintings communicate to the viewer what the subject is feeling, one of the qualities I think separates artists such as him and Rembrandt from people such as me. When I look at the Hermit, I feel that the man is sad, but the outward slant of the brows dictates that he has resigned himself to his lot in life, and no longer tries to better his standing.

In my later work, I want to paint in a style that incorporates pieces of both artists, but I lean more toward Schierenberg at the moment, if only because I find his style easier to paint. I want to add some of the smoothness of Rembrandts shadows with the blocky weathered look displayed in this picture when I paint my own portraits linking to the theme of Passions and Obsessions, (Rembrandt painted loved ones, and I plan to do similiar) though whether the styles are compatible remains to be seen.

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