Jessie Homer French

Jessie Homer French was born in New York in 1940. She currently lives and works in Oak View, California. A self-taught artist, her paintings emerge from a continuous analysis of places surrounding her and reveal the artist’s personal and profound attitude to a local and transient type of composition. Through a simplified language - only apparently naive, flat colours and calm brushstrokes - Homer French treats with delicate care existential issues related to death, nature and rural life. In her work, humanity appears a toxic intruder in a melancholic nature, and yet, even the paintings with the darkest subjects feature a formal vitality capable of giving extraordinary immediacy to her bittersweet and anti-pastoral compositions, in which creation and destruction coexist with exemplary candour. Homer French’s work is included in the collections of the Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.