THERE ARE 182 TAN AND BROWN CHIPMUNKS densely packed into Maija Peeples-Bright ’s 1979 painting Chipmunk Chiracowas with Chickadee Chorine and Callas . There might even be more; I keep losing count. The painting’s chipmunks vary wildly in size, following the laws of neither perspective nor nature.
There are itsy-bitsy ones too small for us to clearly register their characteristic striping, while the largest of the bunch looks out from the very center of the more than four-by-five-and-a-half-foot picture, smiling with red lips and towering like a giant by comparison. In fact, lots of the chipmunks seem to be laughing at something—and the artist’s animals, in general, tend to smile a bit too much. They emote too much, regularly crossing the line past propriety, running against the grain of polite society.
More than just funny and charming, her creatures can be inappropriate, overtly silly, beyond cute all the way to uncanny. The chipmunks populate a picture plane that has been divided, puzzle- or quiltlike, into irregularly shaped flat regions that are separated by lines of peaked dots of paint. Each region has a solid background color different from its neighbors’, like countries on a map.
Some are more topographically textured than others. Together, they constitute a landscape whose busyness lends it too much ambiguity to be read; with the help of titling, it comes into focus as a wide desert vista with rocky hills and hoodoos modeled on the distinctive pinnacles (o.