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| The Pale Nephew, oil on copper, 25 x18cm © the artist, courtesy of Flowers Gallery, London and New York. |
SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL
Flowers Gallery Cork St
An annual treat is Flowers' end-of-year exhibition in which a group
of artists is invited to submit work - in any medium - not exceeding the
dimensions of 9 x 7 inches. Eminent figures as well as established and emerging
artists in the British art world are shown, alongside selected recent
graduates.
Tai Shan Schlierenberg's The Pale Nephew is
on the left.The artist says about the medium he uses:
"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... 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".
We are much more reluctant than we were in the past
to believe that the painter intends to set up a narrative or to convey the
character of the sitter, but here the title of the work sets us on a search for
meaning. A nephew, a blood relative, leans to one side, eyes downcast, boxed in
by the frame. He could be thoughtful, staring hard at something beneath
him, or ill, or pale with excitement. Common sense tells us that the idea that
a character or story-line is revealed in a face is problematic.
In 1989 Tai Shan Schlierenberg won
the National Portrait Gallery's (John Player) Portrait Award. Part of the prize
was a commission to paint the playwright John Mortimer for the Gallery's collection, The
gallery holds several more of his portraits, including Lord Carrington (1994),
Lord Sainsbury (2002) and Seamus Heaney (2004). In 2011 Sandy Nairne, the then Director of the NPG,
produced a book on the history of the BP Portrait Ward. Its 500 portraits reflect
'the diverse methods of contemporary portrait practice, including a dazzling
array of styles, from immaculate photo realism to intense expressionism'.
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