A Conversation with Edgar Jerins

The following is an edited conversation with artist Edgar Jerins that is a continuation of my previous article.

JK: Your medium of choice is very simple: charcoal on paper. Why is this and what are the advantages of charcoal over other art media?

EG: Charcoal is immediate. It follows the mind to the hand to the paper in a direct path. My drawings are large, and technically, charcoal has a great advantage over graphite in that it moves quickly and can cover a large area in a shorter period of time than by drawing with graphite or by painting a substantial canvas. Painting a canvas might take me six to eight months, whereas a similar sized drawing , say five by eight feet, may take closer to two or three months of work. Also, when creating work that is black and white, charcoal gets the deepest blacks.

JK: Moving on to the subjects in your art, two things jump out at first sight; people pausing and often smoking, and the presence of animals. Depicting people smoking in art works has fascinating historical roots, beginning in the seventeenth century with painters such as Joos van Craesbeek and Adrian Brouwer and with artists such as Max Beckman in the twentieth century. In the seventeenth century, there was a somewhat moralistic approach to painting smokers as examples of dissolute conduct. Yet in the twentieth century, artists such as Beckman appeared to use the grasp of a cigarette as something confrontational - even defiant. What does the cigarette smoking mean in your work?

EG: When drawing, I try to tell everything I can about the people I am portraying. Of the people I depict smoking...they are smokers. I’m drawing family and friends and it’s a part of them. On a simple design level, holding a cigarette also engages the hand in a beautiful position.

JK: The animals in your drawings appear to be pets. Can you explain your decision to include them in the composition?

EG: I love animals and pets. Just like the other elements in the drawing, they are part of a person’s narrative. People who never have pets - they are a certain kind of people. For those who do, these animals are part of their identity and all the love and responsibility that having a pet entails. The pet is also an artistic tool - a life force which moves you through the drawing composition.

JK: One of your drawings, Harvey and Rachel in Jeweler’s Row, includes quite a number of these pets. Did this couple actually own all these animals? And other than being a part of their lives, is there another narrative that they represent?

EG: This is their place in Jeweler’s Row in Philadephia. I worked from life on location with their seventeen birds, a fish aquarium, and their five cats. The bird on Harvey’s arm is an homage to Goya’s famous painting of the boy in red with a magpie on a string.* If you look carefully at Goya’s painting, you will see cats in the background intently staring at the bird. This indicates how precarious and frail life can be. In my drawing, I sought that same predator/prey relationship in the alert gaze of the cats towards the newly released bird.

* Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuniga, 1784-1792. Francisco Goya y Lucientes

JK: In a recent lecture, you spoke about addressing life changing events through art. How does this figure in to your own art work?

EG: I lost two brothers through suicide and one brother died homeless. The art makes the pain of these events visible and is an integral part of my artistic journey. In my lectures, when I talk about suicide and all these difficult things, I find that it is cathartic for the audience as well. You can take any person and you can generally find that they have been affected at some point by someone with alcoholism, drugs or mental illness. Life can be very tough.　

JK: Did your artistic journey entail a change in how you depict your subjects?

EG: I started doing my large drawings when I was around forty. Earlier my work was mostly figurative painting. I then changed to black and white drawing. The clothes went back on, and the figures became more specific and less idealized. The people in my drawings reflected their time and their personalities, even their habits. If they chewed their fingernails, I wanted to depict that.

JK: You are an art educator as well as an artist, and run a lively art discussion forum online. What is your major crititique of art education and what would you recommend to students seeking a quality art education?

EG: The problem I see with contemporary art education is that students are not being taught basic drawing skills, and worse, being told that they don’t even need it.

I would maintain that the single most important technique in art education is to learn how to draw, paint and sculpt from life, and to do so vigorously and accurately. Drawing from the human figure has been the gold standard for 500 years. The figure is the hardest thing to draw and paint. The slightest mistake will be glaringly obvious. There is no faking it with the figure.

My best advice to students is to draw from life and also to learn as much as possible about art without being closed minded about it. Art history can be ridiculous in the way it is written as a hierarchy of artists and art movements, ranking artists as important or not important subjects for how they advance a bizarre notion of "progress" in art.

Why a specific work of art or artist moves us is a mystery. Art students arrive at school with their heroes and favorites. These heroes should not be denigrated or dismissed as I’ve seen happen. A teacher’s role should be to honor the students’ favorites but to also expose them to a wide range of art and artists whose art they can incorporate in to their own.

Edgar Jerins is an alumnus of the Pennsylvania Academy of Art and an adjunct professor at the New York Academy of Art.    https://nyaa.edu/
Studio at Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts: http://www.efanyc.org/artist-news/2016/7/26/edgar-jerins?rq=Edgar%20Jerins