Lerner’s artwork often reflects the inspiration she found in the natural and spiritual world. Her dynamic painting, San Miguel, references the archangel Saint Michael, a prominent figure in several of the world’s dominant religions. The background of earthy sienna combined with bold black brushstrokes provide a fiery setting for the theatricality of Saint Michael’s struggles. The thick black gestural strokes of paint hint at the figure of Saint Michael—a spiritual warrior who reflects the inward struggles inside us all—his wings spread wide or mid-flight. A swath of dark blood-red bleeds against the grain of the black lines, reminding us that, near the end of the violent book of Revelations in the New Testament, Saint Michael battles Satan himself.

Lerner’s abstract works reflect her early life spent in California and an affinity for the cultural exchanges she found there. Here, colors of a Western desert sunset lend an ominous background to a struggle of good versus evil—with good prevailing. Transforming the iconography of Saint Michael slaying the dragon into pure abstraction is a brilliant investigation into the possibilities of the method of abstraction itself. Abstraction disrupts any previous attachment to a well-known image and forces us to reconsider what we thought we knew. There is a strong history of the examination of spirituality, mysticism, and cosmology in several of the founding practitioners of abstraction such as Kandinsky and Mondrian. These pioneers of abstraction sought a new language to reach deeper spiritual and instinctive truths not readily available with figurative and direct representation.

While wildly new experimental methods of expression blossomed in the 1970s, women artists such as Judy Chicago continued to construct important abstract works in paint. Lerner’s work here, with its thick black gestural strokes laid atop an ombré color field, feels more influenced by the earlier cohort of 1960s American Abstract Expressionists that included such women painters as Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell. Lerner was an accomplished artist who worked in painting, sculpture, clay, welding, and drawing. She obtained her MFA from the University of Houston. She later settled in Montana to be near her children and continued to create her art there.