Life after the Award: Tai Shan Schierenberg and Ishbel Myerscough in conversation

About

Hear from the contemporary artists as they take you through what is involved in preparing work for a competition and discuss how their lives have individually changed in a multitude of ways since exhibiting in the show. This talk aims to outline how success can appear in many different forms in the art world, including gallery representation, commissions, press, teaching and presenting. Further speakers to be announced.

Ishbel Myerscough studied at Glasgow and the Slade Schools of Art, and works in London. In 1995 she won the National Portrait Gallery’s annual BP Portrait Award competition and as a result was commissioned to paint Helen Mirren’s portrait for the Collection and subsequently Sir Willard White. Her portrait Two Girls (1991), was displayed in the exhibition Self at the Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK in 2015 and at the National Portrait Gallery, London, until November 2016. Her work was presented in a joint display Friendship Portraits: Chantal Joffe and Ishbel Myerscough at the National Portrait Gallery in 2015, capturing their very particular artistic collaboration. Most recently, Ishbel’s work was included in the exhibition Real Families: Stories of Change 2023-2024 at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, and is currently on show at The Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol in the Hayward Gallery’s touring exhibition, Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, 2024.

Tai Shan Schierenberg studied at St Martin’s School of Art and at the Slade UCL. He lives and works in London, Norfolk and the Black Forest in Germany. He has exhibited widely in the UK, Europe, Asia and the US and has work in public collections that include The National Portrait Gallery, Tate Gallery, The Royal Society, BBC and both Oxford and Cambridge Universities. 

Tai Shan Schierenberg is predominantly a painter, although drawing, printmaking, sculpture and photography also appear in his oeuvre. He is also known for his portraiture which includes paintings of sitters such as HRH The Queen, the late Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney and the scientist Stephen Hawking. He has won first prize in The National Portrait, Portrait Award and The Ondaatje Portrait Prize from the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. Throughout his career he has been involved with various art related television projects such as Oil on Canvas and Titian for BBC2 and more recently as a judge on Sky Arts, Portrait Artist of the Year and its sister programme Landscape Artist of the Year which are now on to their eleventh and tenth series respectively, the latter winning the Broadcast Digital Award for best factual programme in 2016.