B. 1953 Buffalo, New York, native John Yerger has worked as a professional artist for nearly his entire adult life, but began the present series of trompe l'oeil tributes to America's most legendary artists just ten years ago. Tapping into the sensation of wonderment he experienced as a young man upon first seeing the works of American painters like Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer and Albert Bierstadt at Buffalo's Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Yerger has melded his meticulous technical facility with a deeply personal source of inspiration.

Classically trained at the Art Institute of Buffalo and Boston's Vesper George School of Art, Yerger previously concentrated on landscapes and more conventional still-life compositions. As these works began increasingly to incorporate trompe l'oeil elements, Yerger arrived at the inspiration for his present subject in 1996, and has devoted himself exclusively to it for the last five years. This will be the first exhibition of these precisely detailed, visually stimulating and entertaining works, continuing the pictorial traditions established by still-life luminaries John Haberle and William Harnett.