About the artist:

Trained as a painter at the University of Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia-born Schurr began to make serigraphs in 1971. Since then Schurr has developed a complex "reduction" method of painting and silk-screen printing that is as precise, and difficult to master, as the extraordinary multi-leveled imagery of his complicated vistas. Using as many as 75 colors in a single image, Schurr works on single large canvas or screen to which he applies stencils of the individual image areas. After an area has been completed, that portion is blocked out, thereby gradually reducing the open areas of the image as the composition slowly builds, layer upon layer, on the substrata. Jerry Schurrs love of nature has led him from his overview of a vast pre-historic landscape to a study of the exquisite creatures that inhabit the nooks and crannies of that space. His latest images are three dimensional constructs of butterflies, moths and orchids. Each of these later color renderings are consistent with Schurrs layered approach. The butterflies, moths and orchids are constructed using color overlays and linear complexities derived directly from the actual specimens or their scientific photographic images. Every one is a celebration. In the tradition of Platos concept that there is an ideal a prior form for all things existing in the material world, Schurrs creations are as close to perfectly symmetrical in both color and construct as he has been able to achieve. These are "Ideal" butterflies, moths and orchids. Recipient of the prestigious Thouron Prize for Painting in 1966, Schurr also won the Eugene Feldman Memorial Prize in 1977 from the Philadelphia Print Club. His paintings and serigraphs are exhibited in innumerable galleries throughout the United States and appear in the collections of the Minneapolis Museum of Fine Arts; Standard Oil of New Jersey; Scott Paper Company and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Currently, Schurr spends his time actively working in his studio in suburban Philadelphia.