Jerry Berneche was a painter and draftsman of representational scenes and portraits featuring extraordinary color work and extremely detailed mark-making. Born in 1932 in Greentown, Indiana, he attended art school at the Heron Art Institute in Indianapolis and then Ohio University for graduate study. He joined the faculty of the University of Missouri Department of Art in 1966. Locally he is well-known as an educator of generations of young artists. The willingness to highly finish multiple drafts, to dig into details, to skip no steps–this may be the most important thing a student can learn in art school, and it was the message of Jerry Berneche’s teaching and of his own work. He had deep and immense patience for detail, and the thorough mining of each subject for the best version, the best compositional presentation. Jerry died in 2016. He had preserved a selection of his paintings and drawings in the flat files of his home studio, reaching back in time as far as 1954. This rather enormous collection of work, still undoubtedly only a portion of what the artist made in his lifetime, makes clear his level of mastery of many styles and media, from pen and ink, to watercolor and gouache, to chalk and charcoal on paper.
