Stray Dogs of Nicaragua

Paintings drawn from a life lived across the world — and from the street dogs of one Nicaraguan city that Peta Kaplan couldn't look away from.

Before the camera became her instrument, Peta Kaplan painted — and the source material for her canvases came from the same place as everything else in the life she was living: the road. Traveling and settling her way across the globe with her partner, Peta gathered what she saw and carried it back to the studio, a practice that grew into a body of work assembled series by series. Farmers and their water buffalo in Vietnam. The canal scapes of Amsterdam. Nude sculptures in Paris. Monkeys and goats in India. And, closest to her heart, the stray dogs of Nicaragua.

That series began where Peta and Ben put down roots. For five years they made their home in the colonial city of Granada, Nicaragua, building a house, building a business, building a life.

The streets were full of strays, and Peta didn't only paint them: she cared for them, volunteering at the local clinic and serving on an emergency response team for animals that were wounded or abandoned.

The paintings grew out of that daily closeness — portraits that meet each dog as an individual, and give weight to animals most people walked past.