Edgar Jerins (Born 1958) was born in Lincoln, Nebraska. From 2003 he has been living in New York City. He is known for his unusually large conte pencil and charcoal works of troubled people and tense domestic situations. These drawings often explore the psyches of troubled young men, put side by side with parental, older, generation helpless to ease their uncertainty and pain. Jerins attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, at age eighteen. He was on a scholarship and he graduated in 1980. While at the university, he won several awards, including the 1980 Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant. Jerins has exhibited at Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, New York, Frye Art Museum, Seattle, Washington, and the Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock. Before he found his current metier, Jerins used to paint what can be termed as commissioned society portraits in New York and Los Angeles inevitably leaning more toward pleasing a client than fulfilling the artist.
His drawings are based on multiple photographs of his subjects that he takes in various positions and locations. But he arranges and rearranges his figures them draws directly on the paper without careful planning. His paintings are generally controlled, more academic, and without the drawings' depth of feeling. The drawings are mood pieces exploring the souls of the artist himself, the men he draws, their families, in a world our world. The drawings have a certain looseness of handling that personalizes the artist's statement and energizes them. Like so many realist artists before him Jerins attended the Realist Painters Protest in front of the Whitney in September 1995.
