Sandra Lerner

Lerner, a painter, holds a BFA from The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA. She has been a working artist since 1975. Lerner has received several grants and Fellowships that allowed her to lecture and exhibit in Syria and Egypt. Two grants from The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation enabled her to work in Taos, which became her home in 1989. The recipient of numerous honors and prizes, her work is included in the permanent collections of the Philadelphia Museum, Rutger's University, Harwood Foundation Museum, New Mexico University Museum, Philadelphia Science Center, Neutrogena Collection, Duke Energy Corporation Collection and others.

Sandra Lerner's paintings are investigations of the natural world through pattern, repetition, and interplay of opposites. The surfaces evolve from many applications and manipulations of wax and pigment. The resulting images are abstract in their use of space and color but have specific links to elements in the natural world and basic geometrical structures. Lerner has investigated the mystical geometric order of Nature and was drawn from images of celestial charts, maps, basic geometry, botanical drawings, Fibonacci Numbers, the Golden Section, and drawings made from the random scattering of seeds.

Artist Statement

I rely on the systems and beliefs of Sacred Geometry, the Golden Section and basic geometric structures that underlie the beauty of nature.

Beauty is a mystery but a common principal is the recognition of good proportion developed around the ratio of the Golden Section (in the human body, plant growth, architecture). The recurrence of Sacred Geometry as a means of describing nature and identifying life forms has been a foundational thread for generations of artists.

This was not the case when I was working on the East Coast but became the strong underpinning of the work I have been doing for the last thirty years here in Taos. There is the light, the enchanted landscape and the rich heritage of The Transcendentalists such as Agnes Pelton, Ray Johnson, and Cady Wells who worked in Taos and memorialized the mystery and magic of this place. They believed that abstract art was spiritual art.

The intersection of Science and Art is interesting to me. I was trained in medical technology before going to art school and it seemed at the time that I was engaging in activities that were polar opposites and had little in common. We tend to think of Science as factual and Art as intuitive. There is that same dichotomy when we think of science and nature, but if you look closely at nature you can observe a mathematical precision in growth patterns. The novelist Vladimir Nabokov wrote, "there is no science without fancy and no art without facts".

I have been exploring the border between abstraction and figuration in images that are improvisations on observed phenomena in the natural world. I have been using circles in my most recent work.....thinking about the idea that the circle is considered a symbol of infinity, without beginning or end, perfect, the ultimate geometric symbol

The intent is to make works that retain a measure of the mystery of nature but also refer to the clarity of science