Edgar Jerins

OMG! Tomorrow!

This Saturday!

Edgar Jerins: Life in Charcoal is memoir, picture book, and social commentary in one grand soul baring volume. The memoir portion includes Edgar’s parent’s lives as Latvian refugees from post WW2 Soviet occupation who find sanctuary in Nebraska. There they raise a family of four boys, three of whom die tragically from the scourges of severe mental illness, drug abuse and su***de – leaving Edgar the sole survivor. As the remaining artistic voice in a family of artists, the artist/author and interviewee takes on a mantle and a mission. The mission here is one of memorialization and preservation, accomplished through charcoal renderings executed in precise, richly detailed traditional methods. The painstaking work of preservation is masterful, and valuable as well for the narratives recorded through writing, interviews and written records. We hear from the models themselves, the artist, and his critics. This provides a refreshingly candid narrative for the work and the means for understanding the process behind creating these large, complex drawings. I especially appreciate the close up reproductions that reveal the complex details in the drawings and the hatch work.
The first illustration in this book is a photograph that Edgar took of a vacant street in Soho during the pandemic. What follows are works on paper by the artist’s brother and mother to establish their artistic connections. The artist’s charcoal works follow these. The artist was once faulted for the use of studio lighting on figures placed in outdoor landscapes. I believe the lighting in fact adds to the poignancy of these charcoal drawings. The people haunt the places they inhabit, being in the landscape but not necessarily of it. Many of the models seem to stare at some distant, unreachable thing. They don’t engage with each other in group compositions, often but not always eschewing the viewer’s gaze as well. Even when the models do meet the viewer’s gaze, their eyes seem to look past the viewer, almost to something looming over the shoulder. Maybe this looming thing is the knowledge that we will all eventually face the empty chair, the vacant room, the street unpopulated. Life is a delicate, ephemeral thing.

Janet Kozachek

Tiger Lilly, oil on wood, 24 x 18, 2024

Sunny and Rocco
oil on linen 25 x 27

I began formal training at age 14. Once a week on Monday evenings. I knew that to get good at art it took discipline and set aside at least an hour a day to draw.
The human figure and face are the most difficult to draw and as I acquired more skills my attention turned to portraiture. And frankly has remained there my entire life.
So in high school when visiting and spending time with friends, I began to draw my friends portraits.
I’ve always been interested in the specific. Not drawing rather universal images of people, but drawing specific people and trying to capture their essential spirit. Katie was a high school friend of our group. Wes had a big crush on her.
Katie, pastel on paper, 25 x 19, 1975

Great free event! Alana and I will be there!

Bethesda Terrace, New York City, April 20, 2020

Bethesda Terrace, New York City, April 20, 2024

https://www.ketv.com/article/new-york-artist-shares-nebraska-roots-in-new-project/44846452

See you Friday from 4 to 8!