Peta Kaplan-Sandzer: The Stray Dogs of Nicaragua

Peta Kaplan-Sandzer is a colorist and expressionist painter living in the Chicago area. She has devoted her time and energy as an artist to portraying the stray dogs of Nicaragua; over time, her works become an allegorical record of the small Central American country's will to survive. Nicaragua's civil war may be a thing of the past, but its problems and poverty reflect the conditions of its troubled history. Kaplan-Sandzer traveled to the country in 2006, establishing partial residence there and introducing Nicaraguan students to oil painting, drawing, and tile-making. The artist is clearly committed to contributing to Nicaraguan culture, and her paintings reflect an abiding concern with the persistence of a people whose historical record has polarized both the inhabitants and supporters of the country. However much Nicaragua has recovered from its past, it remains a country haunted by violence, and its sharp insufficiencies form the implicit focus of Kaplan-Sandzer's expressionistically rendered dogs, who play out a drama of material dispossession. Read as fables of scarcity and survival, the paintings tell us that there exists in Nicaragua a determination to continue against the odds, and so posit hope in the face of often unremedied shortages.

How much can be read into the portrayals of stray dogs, their homelessness and vulnerability evident in the idiosyncratic poses they take? Usually painted against a single background of color, these hardscrabble animals suggest a story in which doggedness triumphs over the problems they face. The portraits of these creatures are first convincing in their own right; they exist as marvelous renditions of creatures whose affections and attachments to people somehow remain viable, despite the very real difficulties they endure. Kaplan-Sandzer is a highly skilled painter who counters her subjects' distress with the beauty of expressive drips, shadows of black and blue, and poses that emphasize the vulnerability of their circumstances. Inevitably painted in singular isolation, the dogs are the one recognizable form on a field that is deliberately close to gestural abstraction. As a result, there is a tension between what is seen and what is implied, what is abstract and what is not. The understanding that these animals are both realistic depictions and objects of the imagination only strengthens our belief that these paintings are more than mere examples of realismÑsomething of the history of modern art enters into the awareness of Kaplan-Sandzer's audience, which sees the works in light of a painterly tradition that clearly stems from modernist leanings. The tension between the subject matterÑthe dogs themselvesÑand the way in which their reality is conveyed make the images highly contemporary.

It is possible to see the opposition in a painting entitled Variation on a Stray, Dark Blue Dog on Yellow, in which Kaplan-Sandzer gives herself over to a very abstract expressionist series of drips, some of which fall down across the dark blue body of the dog painted in the upper left hand of the composition. This is a work in which realism becomes an excuse for a painterly treatment that is as much its own theme as the representation of the animal, who is portrayed only as an simplified figure, lacking the particulars of the mouth, nose, and eyes. A green vertical mass, with drips running down at the bottom of its contour, stands as an abstract sentinel to the dog, around whom is a simple yellow background. The lower part of the painting is wonderfully untidy, with yellow drips spilling over layers of blue and blue-green at the bottom of the painting. The contrast between the dog and the paint results in a kind of standoff, in which esthetic interest in the act of painting itself becomes a theme at least as important as the animal's portrait. The large size of the canvasÑfive feet by five feetÑserves to underscore just how devoted to painting Kaplan-Sandzer is, in addition to her praiseworthy attempts to allegorize her theme of want in Nicaragua.

This is not to say that the allegory is weakened by the artist's attention to technical concerns in painting. Kaplan-Sandzer has a marvelous painting entitled Granada Stray: "Teddy," A Small Dog with a Big Personality; the work describes a white-and-brown furred animal with a closed eye and a collapsed ear. He is nothing but survival itself, and his friendliness comes through quite well in the composition. Here there are again traces of painterliness: a dark-green ground threatens to envelope the woebegone creature. Yet Teddy manages to stave off his environment; his temperament seems neither mean-spirited nor desolate. For all his problems, the dog is essentially well considered, both as an object of interest and the vehicle for warm emotion. It is hard not to see in him the very qualities that make for an existence that more than merely persists, in which survival becomes triumph. Kaplan-Sandzer's fine artistry and moral force are both present in the work, which tells us as much about the painter as it does the issues that concern her.

Jonathan Goodman