A Cathedral on a Townsquare in Summer, Cornelis Springer

I just love Springer’s atmospheric, textural cityscapes. As is often the case, this one is a tour-de-force in the use of value relationships to both suggest space and define the composition.

I find the contrast between the dark building in the left foreground and the almost ghostly tower particularly fascinating.

Cornelis inexorably moves our eye to the top of the tower by strengthening the value contrasts in comparison to the base. But even the base of the structure is pushed forward into the middle ground by the faded values of the distant street.

Tai-Shan Schierenberg’s intense, sometimes enigmatic portraits appear to be composed of rough-edged geometric chunks of color that one minute say “person”, and the next shout “paint!”

Schierenberg is an English painter based in London, whose work in in the National Portrait Gallery, London; and whose subjects include Queen Elizabeth II, the Duke of Edinburgh and physicist Stephen Hawking.

He also does wonderful landscapes, but his passion and focus is in portrature.

His handling of his subjects ranges from straightforward to semi-representational to conceptually challenging. I favor those works in which he finds an almost landscape-like monumentality in the shapes of the head and face, but cleaves more closely to the observation of the immediately seen.

Tai-Shan Schierenberg is on display in a solo exhibition at the Flowers Gallery in New York, that runs until April 2, 2016.

[Via Wil Freeborn]