Hare’s To Love: Turn Down the News, Embrace Joy!

I remember my Dad sitting in his easy chair in Minneapolis watching Victory at Sea, a series of World War II documentaries, while smoke from his Raleigh cigarette swirled about the room. Each pack contained a coupon, which I, an acquisitive youth, collected, banking on the notion that I could redeem them for a Shakespeare brand fishing reel, that I now calculate would have required him to smoke two packs a day for a couple of years. Our parakeet Hoppy perched his green butt-feathers on a mirror above the sofa and pooped, leaving an abstract painting of black and white streaks on the glass.

My dad was navigator of a ship that delivered troops and munitions between North Africa and Italy during the war. He told me stories about being shelled daily, which I later confirmed reading his ship’s logs. My mom told me how he sometimes woke up in panic. He couldn’t let go. I wonder what my father would have felt today watching our old neighborhood become a war zone.

My old neighborhood: The Cup Foods, where George Floyd was slain, was Wilharms Drugs where I hung out at the soda fountain. Walking to Central High school, I often passed 34th and Portland, where just a few days ago, an ICE agent murdered Renee Good. This morning I watched a live video stream of a brave reporter from WCCO-TV, where I once worked, fleeing a cloud of tear gas at 26th and Nicollet, three blocks from my first apartment, after Alex Pretti was pushed to the ground by ICE stormtroopers and shot multiple times.

I grew up thinking that war zones were in other places, not in my neighborhood, where childhood friends still live.

Watching this, on a gloomy, foggy morning in California, evoked a mix of emotions ranging from shock, to sympathy for the victims,  pride in fellow Minnesotans, to dread that my old neighborhood had become a dress rehearsal for a fearsome future.

Then sunshine walked through my front door:

My wife Pat and I greeted artist Maija Peeples-Bright, who is exhibiting at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art and staying in our guest house. Her exhibit is called: Life is Just a Bowl of Terriers: Joy in the Time of Fear and Heartache.

I was ready for that.

Maija’s art: paintings, impasto, ceramics, glitter, yarn, knit dresses, depicts a dazzling, dizzying surreal world of what she calls beasties: an EnorMoose on the slope of Mt. Everest, towering over a menagerie of elephants, tigers, yaks, roosters, even a silly goose.

Maija says she first thinks up a title, often a pun or an alliteration, before she starts a work. OwlThe Way to the Bank is a ceramic mountain of human lips which, looking closely, are owls under a Parthenon of a bank building at its summit.

Sum of Beast over Clowder Clouds and Alligator Sea, is a cloudburst of cats
waiting to rain down on a sea of gators.

Every work makes me smile. As does she.

We became friends, dining, popping champagne corks, sharing stories and giggling for hours. Pure joy.

Maija Peeples-Bright was part of Northern California’s anti-establishment Funk Art and Nut Art movements of the late 1960s and ’70s that also included Robert Arneson and Roy De Forest. It was a time when California artists went wild in protest over the cliche’d abstract impressionism, which became a commercial hit in the hallowed cultural corridors of the East Coast.

As a child, she and her family escaped the war zone of Latvia during the Russian invasion at the end of WWII and ended up near Sacramento, California where she studied art at the University of California at Davis under some of the rising  stars of modern art including Arneson, De Forest and Wayne Thiebold.

Maija lives for and in her art, literally, with her hand-painted shoes and dresses festooned with birds, terriers and other sometimes indescribable beasties. In her days in San Francisco, she inspired the painted ladies movement when she painted her Victorian house in every color of the Dutch Boy Paint catalog. The interior of “The Rainbow House” was decorated with beastie-themed murals.

She talks about a life dedicated to getting out of the boxes of convention.

Kudos to the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art. Maija Peeples-Bright is the first of a series of exhibits called Joy in the Time of Fear and Heartache,  designed to deliver exuberance, positivity, belonging, togetherness and, above all, the joy that is, today, hiding in all of us.

As Maija says, “There are so many things to be joyful for. We can’t let the evil side take us over.”

Whether it be art or politics, we have to break free from of our boxes.