roland peterson - b. 1926

WHEW - we made it through our studio sale! Thanks to all who came by to rescue us from our mountain of hoarded "supplies". AND thanks to you, I can now go and purchace a new easle, one that is NOT a tripod easle.

Todd Kerr stopped by Saturday for a bargain and a chat and brought up a painter named Roland Peterson. He was puzzled as to why he wasn't in the Bay Area Figurative Art book, which is in fact a catalogue for the SFMOMA exhibition in 89, and the first publication that officially recognized the movement.

So of course I had to do an image search for Roland Peterson:







Peterson is a disciple of Richard Deibenkorn, and while he may have been overlooked for the 1989 Bay Area Figurative Art exhibition, he certainly fits the bill in a loose sense, but perhaps not in a strict sense. The way I differentiate him from the rest of the first generationers and even second generationers, is in that his work is tighter and strays even farther away from any sense of abstract expressionism, or "flatness" with that pure focus on paint handling itself as the anchor for the movement. His landscape is clearly defined, the composition focused on a vanishing point, and the use of light is, for lack of a better term, "literal" impressionistic, somewhere along the lines of Wayne Theibaud. This is more apparent in the middle painting, "Two Women and Tree", while the top and the bottom ones are my personal selections and are a deviation from his signature style. But clearly there IS a large contigency of B.A.F.esque painters, who to this day remain loyal to their art practice and the purity of modernist painting. Either way, I'm happy, and of course, this opinion of mine is based solely on my web findings.

You can view lots more jpgs of his work at the Hackett-Freedman Gallery website, in addition to some of our more popular figurative painters: David Park, Hans Hoffman and Milton Avery. SWEET! looks like a trip to H-F is in the works!