Biography

Lives and works in San Francisco.

Roland Petersen’s vibrantly colored and dynamically structured paintings of outdoor scenes are infused with intense California light. Although he was formally trained as an abstract painter, Petersen abandoned pure abstraction by the 1950s and instead chose to explore the formal possibilities of the object and figure. “In the same way that Wayne Thiebaud’s 1960s paintings of racks of cakes and pies tied him forever to American Pop Art,” according to Laura Weir Hill and Scott Hill, “Petersen’s Picnic series emerged full-blown into the era of Bay Area Figurative painting, and critics have linked them inextricably ever since.”1

A native of Endelave, Denmark, Petersen was born in 1926 and immigrated with his family to the United States at the age of three. In 1945, Petersen enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where the gestural, push-pull painting techniques of Hans Hofmann were still widely felt. At Berkeley, Petersen studied with watercolorist Chiura Obata and painter Glen Wessels, whom Petersen considered a mentor. After earning his B.A. and M.A. at Berkeley, Petersen studied at the California School of Fine Arts and then joined the art faculty at the University of California, Davis, in 1956, where he was influential in shaping the school’s art department for the next 35 years.

Although he has continually downplayed his affiliation with the Bay Area Figurative artists, Petersen’s paintings immediately bring to mind the gestural brushwork of David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and Richard Diebenkorn, who revitalized figurative painting in the Bay Area during the 1950s. Like these artists, Petersen was steeped in the traditions of art history, and his architectonic compositions also call to mind Paul Cézanne’s fractured geometries and Pablo Picasso’s cubist disintegration of the picture plane.

In 1959, Petersen began work on his highly acclaimed Picnic series, of which The Wedding Feast with Five Figures is a part. The dynamic setting, composed of uneven planes of vibrant color, recedes toward a group of trees near the horizon. The bright landscape is reminiscent of the agricultural fields surrounding the campus of the University of California, Davis. According to Petersen, “the quality of the light which is so characteristic of the Central Valley became a very important factor. The idea of time, time in a place, time passing as seen in the landscape and life, these are the things I have tried to incorporate into my work—these are the ingredients in the Picnic series.”2

In The Wedding Feast with Five Figures, a group of men and women gather around a picnic table laden with food and drink. Rather than joining together in celebration, however, the figures are isolated, and at the center of the painting, a solitary woman is depicted in profile. Art historian Paul Karlstrom has noted that her stillness mimics the hieratic position often conferred to women in Egyptian art, and that French artist Georges Seurat emulated a similar pose in his well-known painting La Grande Jatte (1884).3 Perhaps Petersen’s woman is awaiting the arrival of her groom—the fifth figure who seems to be mysteriously absent from the scene. Seemingly immersed in their own thoughts, the isolated figures, according to some critics, represent the desolation and loneliness of contemporary American life.4 Petersen has addressed their solitude by explaining, “there’s that power of the lonely, of stillness, of tranquility, that instills the feeling that something is about to happen. The element and suspense of waiting was … what I was trying to capture.”5

A sense of calm pervades all of Petersen’s paintings—a calm that requires viewers to spend time quietly observing each of his compositions. Those who are patient enough to look beneath Petersen’s painterly surfaces will be rewarded, according to Karlstrom, “with the discovery of an art practice that is cerebral, profound, and philosophical.”6 —A.W.

1. Laura Weir Hill and Scott Hill, Roland Petersen, A Decade of Paintings, exh. cat. (San Francisco: Maxwell Galleries, Ltd., 1995), 3.
2. Roland Petersen, interview with Price Amerson in Roland Petersen: A Retrospective Exhibition, exh. cat. (San Francisco: Harcourts Contemporary, 1989), 9.
3. These art historical comparisons were identified by Paul Karlstrom in “Roland Peterson: Nature, Geometry, and Timelessness,” Roland Petersen, exh. cat. (San Francisco: Hackett Freedman Gallery, 2002), 10.
4. Hill and Hill, 5.
5. Petersen, quoted in Amerson, 9.
6. Karlstrom, 5.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)


Roland Petersen was born in Endelave, Denmark in 1926. He studied at University of California at Berkeley, San Francisco Art Institute, California College of Arts and Crafts, Atelier 17 (with Stanley Hayter), Islington Studio, London, The Print Workshop, London, and The Hans Hofmann School. He taught painting at Washington State University, printmaking at UC Berkeley, and painting and printmaking at UC Davis and has won both a Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowship. Petersen's work has been exhibited in museums and galleries around the country, and is represented in many major museum collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Oakland Museum of California Art, Oakland; and the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco. At 76, the artist lives in the Bay Area and continues to paint actively. This will be the first Petersen painting to enter the SJMA Collection. (SJMA Collections Committee, 2003)

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