Visiting Author – Artist Edgar Jerins – Edgar Jerins Life in Charcoal

Friday, October 25th at 5:30 Edgar will be joining us to celebrate his book of art Edgar Jerins Life in Charcoal! This beautiful book exhibits Edgar’s talent for portraiture and capturing the human spirit in the hardest of times. See below for more about Edgar, his book, and praise for his work.

Order your copy of Edgar Jerins Life in Charcoal from Francie & Finch HERE!
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About the Book:
Forged in the crucible of family tragedy, Edgar Jerins’ monumental charcoal drawings are a towering achievement of contemporary American art. Arthur Miller commanded “Attention must be paid” and in these meticulously observed images, the artist does exactly that. His middle American subjects have been buffeted by a sea of troubles, sometimes of their own causing. Jerins brilliantly and movingly captures friends and family members at a moment when all denial has been stripped away. There is no irony here, no flippant art world in-jokes, no smug condescension and certainly no sentimentality. Jerins shows us the redemptive power of suffering, the quiet heroism of the American spirit, and our refusal to give up no matter the odds against us. The difficulties his subjects have with relationships, money, health, aging, substance abuse, violence, and death are part of the human condition that we Americans all know too well. With unflinching honesty and the kind of empathy only known by fellow travelers, Edgar Jerins brings a new realism to American art. His art is not just about life, it is life.

About the Author:
Edgar Jerins was born in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1958. He graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1980. His primary focus was always portraiture, whether the subject was clothed or nude. In 2001 he began a series of large-scale narrative drawings of his family and friends in crisis. The drawings received considerable attention in the form of grants, reviews, and museum exhibitions and purchases.

Artist Statement:
“I consider myself a storyteller. Capturing the times we are living through is one of my primary goals as an artist. My drawings depict real people—primarily my friends and family–in their natural environments. These are people who never expected to find themselves subjects for narrative art, but whose stories need to be told. Many are struggling with addiction and mental illness. Mental illness, in particular, is rarely discussed in our public discourse, and I want to add my voice to help create a realistic view of those suffering from it. My aim is to express the hardships of my subjects’ lives in a way that isn’t hopeless or sentimental and which shows compassion for human frailty. When possible I work from direct observation, photographing my subjects in their home environments. But my drawings merely start with images captured on film. I then heighten their reality in almost a theatrical way. My drawings, for example, are physically commanding—a scale I believe is critical to their impact on viewers. Similarly, I take great pains to position my subjects within their environment in ways that reveal and accentuate emotional resonance.”

Book Review Excerpts: 
“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, Visual Artist

“Jerins brilliantly and movingly captures friends and family members at a moment when all denial has been stripped away. There is no irony here, no flippant art world in-jokes, no smug condescension and certainly no sentimentality. Jerins shows us the redemptive power of suffering, the quiet heroism of the American spirit, and our refusal to give up no matter the odds against us.” –John Thornton

“I see unique things in his drawings especially, of life growing up in the Midwest.  A mindset, a beauty, a bleakness, a poignancy….both despair and comfort.  That is what makes them so compelling to me.  It’s easy to examine the joys in life, but much braver to examine it’s imperfections.” – Ronda Klein