Jessie Homer French

Jessie Homer French’s small-scale landscape paintings combine realism and mysticism to create narrative scenes of life, death and nature. The self-taught artist depicts dark realities of life in rural California – fires, funerals, fault lines – in bright and saturated tones, appropriating a flattened perspective reminist of French Riviera postcards or American pastoral painting tradition. A self-proclaimed “regional narrative painter”, Homer French paints with bittersweetness through content and form. Almost obsessive over cemeteries and coyotes, disaster and decay, she observes and depicts the environment around her with transient, existential care. Only seemingly naive in the simplicity of her composition, the artist’s work is a gloomy exploration of what it means to be human and non-human, in a rapidly changing world. Written by Goldsmiths CCA