Tai-Shan Schierenberg (born 1962) is a British

portrait painter Portrait Painting is a genre in painting, where the intent is to represent a specific human subject. The term 'portrait painting' can also describe the actual painted portrait. Portraitists may create their work by commission, for public and pr ...

, based in London. He was the joint winner of the 1989

BP Portrait Award The BP Portrait Award is an annual portraiture competition held at the National Portrait Gallery in London, England. It is the successor to the John Player Portrait Award. It is the most important portrait prize in the world, and is reputedly ...

and is Head of Painting at the Art Academy in London.

Early life and career

Tai-Shan Schierenberg was born in England in 1962, the eldest of three sons to a Chinese mother and a German father who was a painter. As a child, Tai-Shan spent the first years of his life with his grandparents in Malaysia but was eventually returned to his London-based parents for primary school. Being taken on frequent visits to the London Museums or art galleries made Tai-Shan familiar with painting of all realms and ages, while drawing soon became his favourite activity. After travels to Greece and Asia Minor, the family settled in the Black Forest and, in pursuit of a more ecologically centred life, did some subsistence farming. Tai-Shan attended a Jesuit-run grammar school nearby. He started painting in oils in his mid-teens. At the age of seventeen and with his secondary education completed, he left home, travelled to Frankfurt and Amsterdam, and spent time in Paris, drawing from life at the

Académie de la Grande Chaumière The Académie de la Grande Chaumière is an art school in the Montparnasse district of Paris, France. History The school was founded in 1904 by the Catalan painter Claudio Castelucho on the rue de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, near the Acadé ...

. Schierenberg eventually returned to London, where he has lived ever since. He applied to and was accepted by St. Martin's and in due course,

Slade School of Art The UCL Slade School of Fine Art (informally The Slade) is the art school of University College London (UCL) and is based in London, England. It has been ranked as the UK's top art and design educational institution. The school is organised as ...

for postgraduate studies, which he finished in 1987. In 1989 he won joint first prize in the National Portrait Gallery's

John Player Portrait Award The BP Portrait Award is an annual portraiture competition held at the National Portrait Gallery in London, England. It is the successor to the John Player Portrait Award. It is the most important portrait prize in the world, and is reputedly ...

, and as part of the prize, was commissioned to paint the portrait of playwright

John Mortimer Sir John Clifford Mortimer (21 April 1923 – 16 January 2009) was a British barrister, dramatist, screenwriter and author. He is best known for novels about a barrister named Horace Rumpole. Early life Mortimer was born in Hampstead, London, ...

for the Gallery's collection. The National Portrait Gallery also holds his portraits of

Lord Carrington Peter Alexander Rupert Carington, 6th Baron Carrington, Baron Carington of Upton, (6 June 1919 – 9July 2018), was a British Conservative Party politician and hereditary peer who served as Defence Secretary from 1970 to 1974, Foreign Secret ...

from 1994,

Lord Sainsbury Baron Sainsbury was created in 1962 for Alan Sainsbury in the Peerage of the United Kingdom. There have been two other peers with the surname "Sainsbury" who included their surname as part of their titles; all are from the Sainsbury family, names ...

2002 and most recently

Seamus Heaney Seamus Justin Heaney (; 13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013) was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.

from 2004. He has also executed the commission for a double portrait of the Royal Couple. His paintings can be seen at Flowers East in Hackney. Tai Shan Schierenberg is Head of Painting at The Art Academy in London. Since 2013 he has been a judge on the television show

Artist of the Year ''Artist of the Year'' is a television competition shown on the Sky Arts channel (formerly known as Artsworld and Sky Arts 1) which aims to find the best portrait and landscape painter every year. Overview Through several rounds of regional comp ...

. During the football season Schierenberg gained "unprecedented access" to

West Bromwich Albion West Bromwich Albion Football Club () is an English professional football club based in West Bromwich, West Midlands, England. They compete in the EFL Championship, the second tier of English football. The club was formed in 1878 and has pla ...

Football Club for the production of a

Channel 4 Channel 4 is a British free-to-air public broadcast television network operated by the state-owned enterprise, state-owned Channel Four Television Corporation. It began its transmission on 2 November 1982 and was established to provide a four ...

documentary called ‘The Football Club’, which is part of the channel's ‘Artist in Residence’ series. Schierenberg sought "to understand what it was about the game that makes it so compelling", and whilst he began the project as a football cynic, he emerged as a fan of the club.

Bibliography

*Packer, W. (2005) ''Tai-Shan Schierenberg.'' Momentum, London.

Early life and career

Bibliography

References

Further reading