XXXXXRoy Lerner was lucky enough to have Peter Bradley as his teacher. Bradley gave Lerner direction and introduced him to Kenneth Noland and Anthony Caro. Lerner served as Caro’s assistant for three months in 1976 and, thereafter, took Caro’s advice and traveled to see the great art of Europe. He has always said that he was most taken with Gericault’s “Raft of the Medusa”, Michelangelo’s Sistine fescoes, and Monet’s “Waterlillies,” in other words, the heroic and the pure painterly.

..........When I first met him in the late 70’s, he was painting with a spray gun and influenced by Olitski, like so many painters in those years. He struck me right away as potentially a major figure and I put his work into a group show I organized in 1983 for the Danforth Museum in Danforth, Massachusetts “Abstract Art in New England”. Another young painter, Jill Nathanson, stole the show with her fresh, outrageous pictures. They had a stained ground on top of which she applied heavy gel in a free form, rhythmical way. The pictures retained the tonal, all-over, close value qualities of Olitski but felt fresh and new. This had to do with an aggressive use of acrylic gel which at that stage was cloudy and yellowish. It tended to put people off. Many called it “yucky”. Like the two other proto New New painters of that time, Lucy Baker and Graham Peacock, who were also reacting against Olitski’s refinement, Nathanson’s pictures made the ugly and raw, new positives. Unfortunately, she quickly thereafter lost concentration or focus and could not follow up on this breakthrough. Her pictures became a far less interesting, lower energy.

..........Lerner loved these pictures of Nathanson, and, as it turned out, understood their implications better than Nathanson herself. Attending the Triangle Lake Workshop in 1984, Lerner produced a series of heavy gel, yellow pictures, which were very free form and done on bare canvas. The “yucky” gel both naked and fully modulated into the chromatic color. Utterly authentic and unfamiliar, they were declared the best paintings at the camp by Clement Greenberg, who as a quest critic that year. (Much to the chagrin of some other painters at the camp.)

..........Lerner then, was one of the early founders of New New. Also he has played a unique role in the development of the acrylic medium. From the first, he has shown a unique gift for tonality – an especially rich, middle value range – which is the mark of the pure painter and what drew him to Olitski. This meant that he was uniquely capable of exploiting gel’s “yucky”, yellow character but also that he was especially dissatisfied with it, since, ultimately, it was too specific and therefore limiting. For this reason, Lerner prompted the chemist, Mark Golden to develop perfectly clear, non-yellowing gel. Golden was successful in 1986. Acrylics thereby became full-bodied medium, clearer and brighter than oils and with many more possibilities. Here is one of the biggest breakthroughs in the history of the technology of painting.

..........Once Lerner got his vision in focus, he didn’t hesitate and has become ever stronger and more confident. He is one of our greatest painters. He has over 20 years of wonderful work to his credit. His sensitive tonal range (which he often consciously goes against) and his improvisational hand and wrist drawing are the pillars of his art.

..........Here is how he described his painting in 1992: “Painting is about making your individual mark. I stroke the canvas with a palette knife depositing repeating lines of thick wet gel whose every facet catches the light. This is the cornerstone of my painting structure… Each stroke contains evidence of touch and tell tale signs of emotion. After the first stroke, each subsequent stroke suggests the next and focuses more clearly the possibilities”.

..........Lerner’s signature became a choppy, stutter stroke which created rhythmic marks varying over a chromatic or bare canvas ground without ever repeating. This lyrical improvisation on a stated theme evokes the music of jazz greats like Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and John Coltrane, whose music Lerner loves. Gradually he has come to rely less on this distinctive mark, becoming more and more free form. The more control Lerner surrenders, the more he relies on his in-the-moment inspiration, the freer and stronger his painting becomes. Also, paradoxically, the freer he becomes, the more his pictures suggest images of nature: landscape, strange figures of all sorts, and phantasmagoric events. These resonate our experience and gives character and intimacy to the painting. And however free Lerner becomes, however much he expands his art, he always retains his own unique touch and feel.