Biography
Peta Kaplan-Sandzer paints striking images of stray dogs set against backgrounds of vibrant, enveloping color. Her paintings capture the special character of each dog and the spirit that allows it to carry on its daily struggle for survival.
Kaplan-Sandzer, who was born in South Africa in 1957, had a strong affinity for art, encouraged by the example of her mother, who taught ceramics. Kaplan-Sandzer grew up with a menagerie of pets in a home surrounded by nature, the first step to becoming a painter of animals and a committed environmentalist. She went on to study early childhood education, eventually earning a masters degree in education from the University of Cincinnati in 1984. Moving to Chicago in 1985, Kaplan-Sandzer began taking art classes, focusing first on figure drawing in charcoal, then on painting in oil from the model. Her work then shifted to small thickly painted interiors, followed by a series of urban landscapes.
Kaplan-Sandzer’s work has always been crucially affected by her travels, both her move to the U.S., and her extensive trips abroad. She sees this exposure as shaping her work in the sketches she makes while on the road, in paintings that directly reflect specific locales, and in her sense of social awareness. In 2004 Kaplan-Sandzer visited Peru, and in response made paintings on unstretched canvas of ancient artifacts and traditional market life. Trips to Paris and Amsterdam resulted in large-scale, loosely painted images of the art, streets, and canals of those cities. A 2006 trip to Nicaragua, the first of three, proved to be a turning point in Kaplan-Sandzer’s work. She was drawn first to the working bulls and then to the omnipresent stray dogs that populate the city streets, and began sketching and photographing them. Downtrodden, yet undaunted, the dogs elicited in the artist both fascination and empathy, and became the focus for an ongoing series that now has reach twenty eight paintings. A trip to India has introduced images of monkeys into Kaplan-Sandzer’s recent work.
The Stray Dogs paintings range from naturalistic portraits, to gestural works, to strongly abstract paintings that concentrate on the play of shape and of vivid hues. Reflected in this work is Kaplan-Sandzer’s interest in artists ranging from Henri Matisse, especially his cutouts, with their distinctive joining of form and color, to Milton Avery, who carried on this direction with an imaginative freedom. Other important artists for Kaplan-Sandzer have been Jim Dine, particularly his charcoal drawings, and Bay Area painters Richard Diebenkorn and Nathan Olivera, for their translations of reality into painterly abstraction.
Kaplan-Sandzer’s involvement in the life of Nicaragua has extended beyond the paintings of its stray dogs. She and her family have built a small house in the town of Granada, and there she has helped established an art magnate school, aided by her continuing fund-raising efforts. Kaplan-Sandzer has exhibited her work in solo and two-person exhibitions at Chicago in Bloom, Chicago, Mardon Frost Gallery, Tucson, AZ and Gallery 57, Highwood, IL, as well as in many group exhibitions. Kaplan-Sandzer lives and works in Highland Park, IL.
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