Animal Love Summer is the first full monograph for painter Marion Peck. One of the leading ladies of pop surrealism, Peck populates her dreamlike paintings with strange, cute creatures. As her magical and bucolic landscapes unfold, an uneasy melancholy fills the air -- the birds are chirping, but the sounds are not quite right. The viewer pauses and questions the reality Peck has created, as well as one's own. Themes of hope, despair, mystery, nostalgia, love and death recur throughout Peck's work alongside motifs of dreams, big-eyed animals, natural landscapes,doe-eyed children, royalty and peasantry. With references ranging from Pieter Bruegel to Holly Hobbie, Marion Peck mines the depths of art history, popular culture and the human experience for her meticulous scenes. While peasants dance in a painting of the same name, their son leers at a corralled ass while the evening's dinner runs around with its head cut off. In her painting "F*ck You," a nod to François Gérard's 1804 "Portrait de Mme Tallien," an elegant royal is anything but, as she tells us how she really feels. Peck looks beyond the subconscious, reminding us that the waking world is never quite as it seems. And with her dark sense of humor and irrepressible optimism, she assures us that while life can be ominous, tragic, even deceptive, it is also beautiful, magical and alive with hope.
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