Former Oak Bay painter returns for special show
“Sleepless in Victoria” is one of the paintings that will be featured in Jessie Homer French’s exhibition which opens tomorrow in Oak Bay.
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Almost as excited to be reuniting with friends this weekend as for the opening of her Winchester Gallery exhibit, artist Jessie Homer French misses Victoria greatly.
“I still fantasize about moving back,” she said from her home in Oregon. Homer French grew up in upper New York state and studied art at Los Angeles City College, but moved to Oak Bay in 1996 and lived here for 10 years.
Speaking from what she called a “dark, depressing and lonely house in the Oregon mountains,” the artist said she and husband Robin hope to sell the place and move to the desert. She doesn’t know if they’ll ever move back to Victoria, but she planned this week to rekindle a Friday night tradition from when they lived here: dinner with friends at a favourite Fort Street noodle house.
Homer French’s “regional narrative” painting style is “about wherever I am at the time,” she said, “ – they certainly tell a story.”
A mother of three grown children, she said her beginnings as an artist were quite humble: she accompanied her father, an engineer, on weekend sketching trips.
“One of my earliest sketching experiences was him taking me out to the country to sketch. He probably wanted to give my mother some peace. We ended up in a gravel pit sketching a steam shovel. I was like, what, seven? It wasn’t a thrill.”
She works from photographs more now than she did at the time of her first solo show in 1976. Her preference is to work with oils.
“I like they way they smell. I like the fact that you can cover over things; you can keep painting over and over. I like lots of underpainting and painting over time.”
She divides her work into categories: big themes such as death and fire, but also the obscure – fish and Stealth bombers.
Homer French doesn’t like to intellectualize her work, which captures the eccentricities of place. “Other people can think about them but I don’t. It’s pretty instinctual. Any place where you live is what you want to paint.”
Jessie Homer French’s exhibit of new paintings opens at Winchester Galleries, 2260 Oak Bay Ave. this Saturday (July 11) and runs to Aug. 1. A preview runs from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, with an artist reception set for 1 to 5 p.m.
vmoreau@saanichnews.com
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