“I consider Ms. Lerner to be a very fine painter, gifted with a unique color sense and great freedom of execution. Her screens are objects which go way beyond the decorative. Her work in general has great sensuous presence and stands as a demonstration for a spontaneous love of light and air.” —-Wolf Kahn, January 1, 2003

My paintings are created with oil pigments that are either on canvas or wood panels. My works are intensely colored although the intensity is frequently quite soft. There are often many layers of semi-transparent pigment that take at least a year or more of deep contemplation before the work takes on its soul.

I have worked most of my life as an artist. Painting is my life. I started as a child with pastels and watercolors. I attribute my mother’s support to my hard work. As a child, I worked beside my aunt Polly Wagner, who was a professional modernist landscape watercolorist in Oakland, California.

I have a necessity to transmit the best part of myself through painting. My pictures must come to a place of feeling peace or of the resolution between chaos and beauty, where everything flows, where colors transmit passage light, where density becomes form and energy, and where brushstrokes transmit pure feeling.

My paintings record gardens and the landscapes that are part of my California environment; many are drawn from plein air studies and are finished in the studio. My backyard garden has been an important influence. The notion of the value of Nature as our primary foundation and the celebration of the source is my focus.

The daily tragedies that occur in life make me spend my time painting to transmute them into paintings that uplift the spirit and bring hope to all who see them.