Maija Peeples-Bright (b. 1942 in Riga, Latvia, lives and works in Rocklin, CA)is one of the few women artists associated with Northern California’s Funk and Nut art movements of the late 1960s and ‘70s. In 1965 she graduated with a masters degree in art from UC Davis and had her first solo exhibition at the renowned Candy Store Gallery in nearby Folsom, CA, where she exhibited annually until 1991.

Her wildly inventive practice comprises compositions bustling with animals of all kinds, forming surreal, imaginative landscapes in audacious impasto. Adding a growing number of animals—lovingly referred to by the artist as ‘beasties’—to her visual lexicon with each passing year, they represent alternate realities, infusing gaiety and a sense of the absurd into impossible scenarios. Highly distinctive, her animal groupings relish in the extreme, often taking up every inch of the canvas; multiplying her subjects into dizzying arrangements, they comprise entire worlds.