I'm a painter and I paint portraits and I paint landscapes and I paint people in landscapes.
My name is Tai-Shan Schierenberg and this is my first encounter.
My first encounter with Meredith Frampton’s ‘Portrait of a Young Woman’ came at a very important point in my life.
When I came to England in the early eighties to study art and I went to Saint Martins and the Slade. It's kind of interesting when one’s a young artist, there's a sort of arrogance. You have to be kind of blind to your own failings or you would stop immediately.
When you see a painting that is so superlative in every way like the Meredith Frampton portrait, it kind of puts you in your place. It could put you off painting. But then, you know, the beauty of it sort of you think yeah I want to make something beautiful like that.
I was born to a Malaysian Chinese mother and German father. My father is a painter and I come from a painting background where you painted Aus der Magenkuhle from the pits of your stomach you know, it was instinctive and it was very gestural and it was very emotional.
And so when I came to the Tate and saw this painting that was ice cool, I saw it and I was ‘Oh, you can be that powerful and be quiet’. You don't need to be thrashing around painting huge expressive paintings. You can do it a different way and I remember it being a profound realisation.
His care for the edge of the dress to the background or the scroll in the front to the background or the bow or the way the cello head is. I mean, it's absolutely meticulous to the point that by his fifties he was blind. So he paid a price for this level of technical expertise.
At the end of his life when he was 88, two years before he died, he had his very first one man show here at Tate Britain and it restored his faith in his work and I mean that’s sort of rather moving.
That painting has always been there in the back of my mind as I tried already as a young man just to cool down. You think emotion drives everything and actually there's there are different ways to make art and so that was a profound lesson.
