Artforum

Beyond this subset of works, the chipmunk paintings are also coextensive with the entire body and thrust of her production. In all the years she has been making art, Peeples-Bright’s vision and aesthetic have stayed remarkably consistent. The work always orbits around animals—any kind you could dream up and more besides. Different decades produce variations spinning off her foundational animalia. In every series, her paintings’ energy exceeds exuberance. But the chipmunk in particular is representative of the whole project on another level, like a meta-mascot. See, the chipmunk gathers and hoards the stuff she desires, squirreling away nuts and nibbling fervently, ceaselessly. Her work is collecting treasures. She is clever, funny, and tricky. She alternately darts suddenly and freezes briefly in place, Looney Tunes style, her actions recalling the movement of our eye as it takes in the overabundance of detailed activity in these paintings. A chipmunk is driven and single-minded, busy stuffing its expanding cheeks and consuming hurriedly. A chipmunk aptly affiliates Peeples-Bright’s work with what Manny Farber championed in 1962 as “termite art,” an approach to artmaking that is “involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn’t anywhere or for anything . . . doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it.” Peeples-Bright’s total life investment in minutiae and strangeness is only one factor. Another is her persistence and insistence on her own idiosyncratic vision. She accumulates animals, over and over and over again, endlessly repeating the project anew, tweaking her theme and switching out one creature for another, one pun or rhyme or alliteration for the next.

Regardless the decade or series, Peeples-Bright’s paintings exude a Spinozan sense of divinity that is everywhere to be found in nature. Pagan joy is palpable when she exclaims, in an old PBS interview, “Art, music, dance, flowers, trees . . . observing, paying attention to details—it’s better than religion, I think!” It’s the kind of pagan effusion to be found in complex composite animals that date back to as early as the twelfth century in Hindu temple carvings and that gained further popularity, around the seventeenth century, in various motifs formalized in Mughal court painting (commonly featuring composite elephants and horses, for example) and Persian miniatures (with that genre’s unique composite plants and camels) that express a mystical belief in the divine unity of all beings. Or as seen in the work of the sixteenth-century painter Arcimboldo, who is best known for this kind of thing in the Western tradition, painting iconic allegorical portraits out of animals or foods of a certain theme, like the four seasons. In many ways, her comical, woozy dream scenes are archetypal hallucinatory visions. Yet she’s never been into drugs; wine and beer, yes, she tells me, but not hallucinogens, because that one time she got accidentally dosed by the party punch she didn’t like it. Still, her sensibility is undeniably psychedelic: one thing morphing into another; the mutual permeability of proximate bodies; the destabilizing sense that rational order is coming undone or coming together by degrees of looseness, texture, and scale; and the hyperanimation of cheery creatures that could be relatives of the Grateful Dead’s dancing bears. 

Maija speculates that perhaps it all started with a small number of old Latvian illustrated children’s books she grew up with and still keeps in her studio. Her way with language, subject, and style taps into childhood and childlike play, echoing pedagogical strategies tied to literacy like phonics and onomatopoeia. Animals are an evergreen delivery mechanism for early education. But whatever may have triggered her, a vision as distinct, strong, and enduring as hers must be hardwired. Despite the fact that she was deeply enmeshed with peers in her scene who shared many aesthetic principles, it is nature not nurture that produces an art like Peeples-Bright’s—something unfaltering and vivid, something compulsive and driven, something that can’t be helped:

"I have Visions. . . . I know what I’m going to make a long time in advance. . . . I’m motivated by my Visions. I keep thinking of things in animal forms. I concentrate very hard, close my eyes, and get it as a sculpture or a painting or something else in one of the other media I use, like crochet or clay. Yes, I visualize ahead what I make, physically. And I never depend on accident at all for my results."

Robust, busy, frenetic, surprising: Nut art is termite art and termite art is chipmunk art.

BORN IN RIGA IN 1942, Maija Gegeris was the only child of two schoolteachers. They immigrated to America, by way of a refugee camp in Germany, to escape the advancing Soviet Army. She was eight years old when the family arrived in California, where they had secured a sponsor in Orangevale and agricultural jobs. She grew up in Sacramento and attended UC Davis, in the early ’60s, majoring in mathematics until she fulfilled a course requirement in her third year with an art class taught by William T. Wiley, a recent hire in a nascent art department that would soon become rather legendary. Wiley motorcycled to class, set up heaps of things as still lifes, told the class to draw what they saw, and left the room. Maija Gegeris switched majors and stayed on to earn her MFA there in 1965, studying with Wiley, Robert Arneson, and Wayne Thiebaud. Roy De Forest came to teach right after she left UC Davis; the two became fast friends, bonding over an aesthetic kinship spanning decades through to the present. (De Forest and Peeples-Bright recently shared a two-person show, curated by Adrianne Rubenstein, this past summer at New York’s Venus over Manhattan.)

Gegeris had her first exhibit at Adeliza McHugh’s now-famed Candy Store Gallery in nearby Folsom, also in 1965, marking the beginning of a close personal and professional relationship between the two women, with the artist regularly exhibiting there until the gallery closed with McHugh’s passing in 1992. She also became Maija Zack in ’65, marrying poet David Zack. She painted the interior and exterior of their Victorian house on Steiner Street in San Francisco’s Fillmore neighborhood, famously dubbed the Rainbow House for the many colors arrayed across its facade (her signature animals crowded the ceilings and walls). Her name would change again over the course of two later marriages, first to Peeples and then Peeples-Bright, a fittingly fortuitous moniker for such an irrepressibly sunny person.

Peeples-Bright is closely associated with both major Northern California art movements of the ’60s and ’70s, Funk art and Nut art, the latter of which she was a founding member. Funk describes the group of Bay Area and Central Valley painters and ceramicists working in an idiosyncratic and blithely crude figurative Pop style that foregrounded humor and irreverence, and which overlapped with the somewhat more specific group of Nut artists. In the middle of the Funk–Nut Venn diagram are artists like Peeples-Bright, Arneson, De Forest, Clayton Bailey, and David Gilhooly, all of whom showed often at the Candy Store Gallery, their de facto hub. Funk and Nut had direct ties to the Hairy Who, both in spirit and in person, through Gladys Nilsson and Jim Nutt, who came from Chicago to teach at Sacramento State College in 1969 and likewise exhibited at the Candy Store Gallery. More than most, Peeples-Bright embodied the movement as manifestoed by De Forest in 1972 for the first Nut art exhibition: She has always been an artist who is “an eccentric, peculiar individual creating art as a fantasy with amazing intention of totally building a miniature world into which the nut could retire with all his friends, animals and paraphernalia.” Like a true Nut, she makes impossible, wonderfully insane scenarios that are ecstatic, bizarre, cheeky, and unlike anything else. Nut art embraces contrarian, antiestablishment nonstyle and pseudo-naive style; it espouses unselfconscious absurdity and flair. Robust, busy, frenetic, surprising: Nut art is termite art and termite art is chipmunk art.

From the beginning, the key features of her maximalist art were already in place—an abundance of bright color and pattern, loose animal figuration, exaggerated smiling faces, the nesting of one thing inside another, titular wordplay, and invented beasts, or, as she calls them, “beasties.” As a word-object, “beasties” defangs something as scary as beasts, retaining wildness while privileging a lighthearted, infantilized narrative. She introduced her nonspecific, imaginary “beastie” figure in early works like SeaSaw Beast, 1965, in which multiple friendly monsters pile on top of each other while smaller ones scatter within. They tend to be oafish, flat, irregular, wonky, and able to accommodate or fill any space, prefiguring an ’80s sensibility adjacent to artists like Keith Haring and Elizabeth Murray. 

As outlandish, brash, and flamboyant as her paintings typically are, things really clicked into place beginning with Goose Lady Godiva, 1969, after which her pictorial project seized on the momentum of its own steady internal logic. As in math, there are clear parameters, regular operations, predictable variables, and sets of rules that govern. Animals inside animals, creatures inside creatures, this inside that: Her complicated, imbricated scenes propose existence itself as a series of parasitic and symbiotic relationships, an ecosystem of total entanglement. Every animal can be host and habitat for another, just as we humans are host to all sorts of bacteria and countless microorganisms. Peeples-Bright’s paintings elaborate on the host-guest structure, with wordplay dictating which animals or plants occupy their respective roles: She’s paired antelope and ants, lizards and lilies, fossae and figs, jackalopes and jellyfish, griffons and grapes, dragonflies and dragons, pandas and pangolins. She likewise animates inanimate things such as flames filled with flamingos, a coliseum crowded with collies, trains full of turkeys, and carrots packed with parrots. This creature-inside-creature paradigm also manifests for her in other, everyday ways, like painting animals on the clothes she wears so that she appears to have walked out of one of her works.

She embeds animals and beasties like Russian nesting dolls, with the implication that there is always another smaller or larger level of perspective at which we will discover more creatures, more life. At its core, her project trains the viewer to be alert and on the hunt, to scour the surface for details. There are always more animals to discover, many of them so small that they get lost in print reproductions and so abbreviated or notational as to be barely detectable, even when seen in person. Having been repeatedly surprised by the unexpected appearance of additional camouflaged creatures, I’ve gradually found myself wondering about every inch of brushwork, Is that an animal, too? This feels like an ethic: Every stroke dangles the possibility and promise of newfound life. Similarly, her paintings also wonder, What turns a shape into a body, a blob into a being? What part of a thing indicates it is alive? Peeples-Bright makes expert use of the ubiquitous trick, learned in childhood, of putting eyes on anything to turn it into something with which we can, and want to, identify. Give it a face, even just partially, and our minds fill in the rest, take the leap. A face, it turns out, is what we’re always looking for—and finding—in a thing. 

Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer is a writer and curator in Los Angeles. She runs The Finley Gallery and Pep Talk, which recently copublished Fun to Be Dead: The Poems of Bob Flanagan.