Nature isn’t always kind to itself. When storms rip through coastal landscapes, when forest fires devastate, when rain lashes the leaves and branches until they tear from their hold, the results can be brutal. Ravaged, splintered. As if nature hungers after itself, chews and tears, only to rebuild its own sustenance.
The landscapes in Mette Homar’s paintings can seem harrowed in the same naturally self-destructive way – if there is a rift it is of another kind than the one caused by human devastation. At the same time, the paintings have a certain calm about them. There is something ancient wallowing in the landscape – the spirit of nature that stands strong and proud and stunningly beautiful. Sometimes the trees in Homar’s nature depictions seem to be growing on a thin layer of earth: a crust that has born hundreds of thousands of years of vegetation and life. Humans are the passive objects, nature the active subject. Humans have been pushed aside or they have actively chosen to not participate. Hierarchies have shifted and landed just as it was meant from the beginning.
The windswept impression is primarily based on the way Homar lets her work develop. There is a tempo in the pull of the oil pastels against the paper, a directness and almost unbridled movement in how the colour fields arise. Despite what the motif represents, the handling of the material and the approach to the creative process seem to border on the intuitive painting of abstract expressionism: freedom and spontaneity of movement. Here we witness a drive to depict, but with a greater emphasis on light, colour and movement than a realistic rendering.
Abstract expressionism is also Mette Homar entry point into landscape painting. Although her motifs are more representational, the movement’s influence on her work is just as tangible and important as French Impressionist Claude Monet’s interpretations of his surroundings were for the abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell. As Monet’s eyesight deteriorated, his paintings increasingly moved in the direction of what we would later call abstract expressionism. Nature was always his model, just like for Mitchell, and now for Homar. They see the purple of the sky in the morning, know that the sea is rarely completely blue and that it can be reflected by grasslands or mountainsides as much as the other way around. Like Mitchell, Homar paints the memory of different places in nature, and tries to capture the feeling that these landscapes evoked. In their very different imagery they construct a texture and thus energy in similar ways. Mitchell does it through fast, wide brushstrokes – Homar through thick layers of oil pastels. In Homar’s work there are elements of Monet’s sketches and studies of motifs, quickly executed with oil pastels in situ in order to capture the light and colours. They also share a need to transcribe their innermost feelings onto the painting.
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