Life in Charcoal

“Life in Charcoal” is an unforgettably potent and extraordinary record in charcoal drawings of some of the wrecked and abandoned lives left scattered like jetsam in the wake of the American Dream.

Enduring Darkness: Edgar Jerins’s Life in Charcoal

By Michael J. Pearce

A book about Edgar Jerins (b. 1958) titled Life in Charcoal has three goals. It collects the major works of two decades of Jerins’s practice as an important realist artist, it provides a searing memoir explaining the intense darkness of his imagery, and it is a memorial to his Job-like endurance. “I had total control of the book,” Jerins explains. “I wanted it to be different from an art book that you open up and it’s just about the work.” Recognizing the importance of Jerins’s art, Robert Cozzolino, curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, has written the book’s foreword and helped acquire a major drawing for his museum’s permanent collection. Jerins has achieved his goal. This book is not for the faint-hearted.

It is not a book of pretty pictures, although readers will immediately appreciate Jerins’s exceptional skill. It is not a book of romantic or superficial pleasure, though readers will doubtlessly be touched by his fearlessly honest self-exposure and love for his erased family. Life in Charcoal is an unforgettably potent and extraordinary record in charcoal drawings of some of the wrecked and abandoned lives left scattered like jetsam in the wake of the American Dream, an epic of drugs and death drawn with personal insight and clarity.

Decades of Heartbreak

This is a record of multi-generational tragedy, beginning with his parents’ childhood in Soviet-occupied Latvia under conditions of political persecution, mass deportations, and oppression so appalling that when the Nazis forced Stalin’s stooges out, the German occupation was seen as an improvement — despite the slaughter of Jews, gypsies, and other ethnicities. After the Nazi defeat, many Latvians fled from the Soviet reconquest, and for several years survived in Red Cross camps for displaced people in the ruins of post-war Germany. Jerins’s mother, Rita, painted the camps with the eyes of a child, and some of her pictures are featured in the book. Sponsored by a generous Lutheran family inspired by Christian charity, her family immigrated in 1950 to the idyllic opportunities of Lincoln, Nebraska.

Jerins’s father, Gunars, had a harsher opening act to the drama of his American Dream, which only became possible after a year of servitude as a cotton picker to pay off the cost of his immigration. Ultimately he found work as an accountant in the suburban landscape of 1950s Omaha. He met and married Rita in 1952, and within eight years, four boys were born into the promise of the New World.

But the family’s dream became a nightmare as the demonic horrors of addiction, schizophrenia, and self-destruction possessed and destroyed them. Two of Jerins’s three brothers shot themselves to death in the haze and misery of auditory and visual hallucinations and medications that incapacitated them from productive lives. The third, once a handsome and prosperous man, became a homeless alcoholic and addict living on the streets, eroded by beatings and abuse. He died wretchedly after his leg was smashed in a fall outside a hospital.

Jerins drew them all, remembering them so he could tell his own story of enduring the darkness of these deaths. He drew his tormented friends and family members as they were oppressed by the personal and pervasive horrors that can haunt the Midwest. The shocking stories he tells in his huge pictures are not cheerful tales of intrepid success and glory in the face of overwhelming odds, but astonishing revelations of suffering and stoicism. “I know what I want out of my work,” he says. “To tell these narratives of the difficult side of life, the harder things people are going through… I was able to tell my story by telling other people’s stories. It’s once removed, but it’s universal.”

Using charcoal (appropriately born of purifying fire) to create impressive images of generations erased by relentless tragedy, he has created a powerful record of life in the forgotten country of the flyover states, especially Nebraska and Kansas. Jerins’s charcoal drawings are superb, and his bleak and searing images deserve to be engraved onto the collective memory of our times. Nevertheless, there is little redemption here — the deep tones of endurance are the only uplifting notes in the melancholy requiem of his people’s lives.

Continue reading about Edgar Jerins, his charcoal drawings, and Life in Charcoal, in the November/December 2023 issue of Fine Art Connoisseur.

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