[1][2][3] Associated with Chicago's influential "Monster Roster" artists early in his career, he shared their enthusiasm for expressive figuration, fantasy and mythology, and their existential outlook, but diverged increasingly in his classical formal concerns and more detached temperament.

[20] Fusing his regard for Rembrandt, Renaissance and Baroque masters, Degas, expressionists like Soutine, and modernists like Francis Bacon and Giacometti,[18] he developed an introspective, intuitive style that suggests but eludes labels like Expressionism, Impressionism, Surrealism, Fantasy, Classicism, or Realism.

[1] Hallmarks of his style are his atmospheric modelling, restrained palette, and intense, bleaching light, which often creates a diaphanous space in which subjects appear "inexplicably muted as if viewed through a mist or scrim"[9] or seem to hover "somewhere between mirage and dream.

Over time, Giacometti's influence on Lerner grew and his work became more detached and ethereal, with "substantiality and concreteness displaced by diffusion of light" and color suppressed in favor of tonality and pale hue.

Inspired by a visit to The Museum of the Mummies in Guanajuato, Mexico, he began exploring the beauty of decay and the feelings evoked by death through depictions of mummified, skeletal or hanged figures, corpses, and mythological subjects.

[26] Reviews commented on the epic tone, muted horror,[27] "delicate animation and expressive grace" of works like Descent (2001) that considered humanity "variously as puppets in the game of life, pure physical matter, or tortured souls.

[32] In the late 1970s, Lerner made a major shift to still lifes and landscapes, prompted by a trip to the French maritime Alps, and later cemented after the purchase of a summer home in coastal Maine.

[18] He then turned to spare groupings of natural materials like rocks, shells, driftwood, leaves, bones and gourds that have been likened to Zen gardens in their "calculated casualness," careful arrangement, and spatial tension.

[1] Critics attributed this to Lerner's "opalescent light,"[33] which gave his shadows palpable form[21] and created the "effect of a hazy, delicately colored, and possibly mystical procession of shapes across the canvas" that suggested landscapes.

Describing the contrast between Maine's "dramatic, almost brooding landscape" and Chicago's urban unruliness as "a kind of epiphany," he said, "I became drawn into the more spiritual, psychological and atmospheric qualities and the sense of oneness that pervades everything in nature.

"[18][30] Critics described these new paintings as "landscapes of wonderment"[21] and "hard-headed poetry";[34] and compared them to the work of Hopper[3] and Rothko,[1] noting Lerner's use of light as an agent of transformation to harmonize what he sees in nature.