The self-proclaimed “regional narrative painter” Jessie Homer French is known for landscape paintings and genre scenes that rely on incongruous combinations and dreamlike imagery to create mysterious, unforgettable pictures of life, death, and nature. In many of her small-scale paintings, the West Coast wilderness is shown in penetrating detail, offering eccentric yet pensive portrayals of the American environment and humans’ uncertain role within it. Evoking American pastoral, regionalist, and realist painting traditions, Homer French’s works often involve imagery of stillness, estrangement, death, decay, and disaster. Appearing in swathes of bright, flattened colour, coyotes roam amid spiny Joshua trees, fish leap over rocks in craggy creeks, a deer lies dead in tufts of grass. In Winter Burial (2020), slabs of stone dot a snow-topped ground; in Bitterbrush and Sagebrush, Bridgeport Cemetery, and Island Deer (all 2020), bodies rest peacefully in their caskets beneath marked graves in wintery landscapes. Homer French’s haunting themes also encompass the spectre of natural disaster, including the American West Coast’s prevalent wildfires, as in Burning and ON FIRE (both 2020). Mojave Stealth Bombers (2013), wherein the titular vehicles fly over an airfield and wind farm, is a menacing scene of confrontation between nature and human encroachment.
Madeline Weisburg
