Jessie Homer French

“In the second world war I had a rubber ball of Hitler’s head to kick around. It was in vivid color with a black forelock and mustache – perfect.”

— Jessie Homer French (2016)

Jessie Homer French (b. 1940, New York City) is a self-proclaimed “regional narrative painter” who routinely, perhaps even obsessively, paints archetypes of death and nature. In addition to painting, Homer considers fly fishing, mapestry-making and hook-latch as other forms of her creative outlet. The candidly dark themes and consistently earnest representations in her works attest to the fact that these pastimes are not extraneous to painting but causal passions that fundamentally underwrite her creative process and voice. Having lived between British Columbia, Oregon, New York State, and most recently along the San Jacinto Mountains of the California desert, narrative themes of the outdoors abound: fish eating or about to be eaten, roadkill portraits, brush fires, sinister graveyards, stealth bombers…

For her debut exhibition at VSF, as well as her first solo exhibition of paintings since 2009, Food Chain brings together a fresh range of works that reveal such life ruminations, in varying degrees of vigor and decay. What Homer French would summarize as: “Simple human stuff.”