Mermaid Maija & the Island Paintings: Maija Peeples-Bright

Maija Peeples-Bright is one of few women artists commonly associated with Northern California’s Funk and Nut art of the late 1960s and ‘70s. For 60 years, Maija Peeples-Bright has made surreal and maximalist paintings and ceramic sculpture composed primarily of ‘beasties’ from the animal kingdom. The artist’s dizzyingly dense compositions are constructed with distinctively tessellated visions. Her newest paintings draw inspiration from islands around the world: Sardinia, England, Japan, Hawaii, Australia, Zanzibar. The seductive intrigue of these locales is expressed through multiplying grinning animals of all kinds dancing across land and sea. Hippo Hawaii for example features a landmass composed of neon orange hippopotamuses and a surrounding sea of shimmering, parading peacocks, octopi, horses, and whales. This cast of characters is rendered in the artist’s typically thick impasto and vivid color, adding a physical dimension to the bustling animal compositions. Self-portraits of the artist as a mermaid appear in both the paintings and ceramic sculptures. She swims joyously with pandas in Jaguar Japan and her arms embrace Ocelot Oahu. As a sculpture, Mermaid Maija explores architecture and landscape–houses, towers, hilltops–but is never to be seen without her beasties who emerge as her mermaid hands, or as window dressing. Across this newest body of work, Peeples-Bright ecstatically transmutes herself into the alternative world of her beasties and invites the viewer to share in her idiosyncratic form of gaiety.