Artist Jerry Schurr was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and trained as a painter at the University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts before beginning to make serigraphs in 1971. Schurr first made a name for himself with his American landscapes, made using the difficult-to-master “reduction” method of painting and silkscreen printing. In this process, Schurr uses up to 75 colors and applies stencils of images, building up layers on the canvas.

Before long, Schurr’s interest in the natural world led him to focus on depictions of butterflies, moths, and orchids. In these works, he uses scientific photographs and combines the qualities of many specimens to create a perfect and symmetrical representation of each species. Schurr won the Thouron Prize for Painting in 1966 and the Eugene Feldman Memorial Prize in 1977 from the Philadelphia Print Club. He has had solo exhibitions in Philadelphia, New York City, San Francisco, and Seattle, and his work appears in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the New York City Public Library, the Library of Congress, and the Portland Museum of Art, among many others.