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. Upon returning to Chicago, he began working on minimalist paintings of paper bags (1978) that, formally, recalled the mountains for him. 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. Contrasting them to his other work, Lerner describes the still lifes as "a more direct approach to the pure pleasure of looking at things."
