Inside their home in Pacifica, south of San Francisco, Roland Petersen and Caryl Ritter Petersen have amassed a trove of treasures — an eclectic mix of fanciful hats, surrealist photography, original paintings and secondhand finds. It's clearly a home occupied by working artists.
Turning 100 today (March 31, 2026), Roland Petersen, professor emeritus of the University of California, Davis, is still creating large, colorful, delightfully happy paintings, many inspired by his time at campus Picnic Days. His wife is nearly always in his scenes, in one (or several) of her many hats.
“How would I describe my own paintings?” Petersen, sitting on a couch in their living room, pondered the question for a moment.
“I describe the aura of sun and time,” he said. “And I usually have early morning lighting conditions and afternoon lighting conditions that I incorporate into one painting so, often, I have two suns in one painting and seven Caryls.”
The first painter to be hired on as a faculty member, Petersen taught art and art history at the university for 40 years from 1956 until 1996, helping build the art department under Founding Chair Richard L. Nelson.
“That was the greatest period,” Petersen said of 51ԹϺ Davis in the 1960s. “We had the best art department in the U.S.”
During this time, Nelson went on to hire 11 other notable artists as part of the original 12 instructors, including Wayne Thiebaud, Robert Arneson and William T. Wiley. That first generation of students would also meet artistic acclaim. Among them, Bruce Nauman, M.A. ’66; David Gilhooly, M.A. ’67; and Deborah Butterfield ‘71, M.F.A. ‘73.
Since retiring, Petersen has continued to give back to 51ԹϺ Davis, establishing the Petersen Printmaking Internship Fund at the College of Letters and Science and donating numerous paintings, drawings and etched copper plates to the university.
His paintings can be seen at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, Peter J. Shields Library and at 51ԹϺ Davis Health. Two paintings are on display in , the exhibition , as is a portrait of Petersen taken by photographer Ansel Adams.
Roland Petersen continues to be a vital contributor to the arts in Northern California. As a painter and experimental printmaker, he encouraged generations of students to find new means to express the beauty of the Central Valley. His Picnic Day paintings continue to resonate with everyone on our campus.” —&Բ;Founding Director Rachel Teagle, Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art
An early introduction to painting
Born in Denmark in 1926, Petersen said his childhood home was loving and supportive. His father was a painter of another kind — he painted houses for a living.
As a young adult, Petersen emigrated to the U.S. and enlisted in the Navy, serving during the Iwo Jima invasion. He then studied at 51ԹϺ Berkeley, the San Francisco Art Institute and California College of Arts and Crafts. Before being offered a permanent position at 51ԹϺ Davis, Petersen taught at Washington State University.
Petersen painted and did photography and printmaking, teaching all three in addition to art history. Yet to him, nothing compares to painting.
“When I paint, I’m in heaven,” Petersen said. “It’s part of my life, like breathing.”
Playing with ‘push’ and ‘pull’ in painting
Petersen’s paintings reflect his interest in still life material, landscapes and people. He considers himself part of the Bay Area Figurative Group, artists who incorporate human figures into the environment.
“I call my style ‘abstract realism,’” Petersen said. “I’m taking the basis of realism and playing on that in an abstract way.”
The patterns of checkered fields might be repeated in patterns on tablecloths, umbrellas, clouds and trees.
“The landscape has a sort of re-echoing of forms that are in other places,” he said.
Petersen was greatly influenced by the two summers he studied with the Hans Hoffman School of Fine Arts in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Hoffman was known for his push/pull dynamic.
“It’s kind of the theory of opposites,” Petersen said. “I’m still involved with that kind of playing with opposites —pushing color one way, space one way, transforming into forms that go left and right, in and out, so I’m sort of shadow boxing with shapes.”
“What’s coarse and sort of rough, I try to oppose that with something adjacent that might be smooth so you can see the difference of the coarseness of the brushstroke to the sharp edge of, say, a knife or a pair of scissors,” he added. “I might be cutting to a very sharp clean edge, and then a fuzzy edge, sort of playing with it.”
The perpetual ‘Picnic Series’ paintings
The Picnic Series, which has continued for decades and is still being added to, is his most recognizable, well-known work.
First inspired by 51ԹϺ Davis’ annual Picnic Day celebration, Petersen naturally gravitated to the combination of still life, landscapes and people all in one painting.
"It seemed a natural way of working on what I was interested in,” he said, “and I’m still doing Picnic Day forever and ever.”
The first paintings in the series were done in oil but, sometime in the 1960s, Petersen realized the turpentine he used was irritating his lungs and switched to acrylics.
He then moved on to the Satellite Series, dealing with landscapes from above. Taken up in an airplane by a friend, Petersen would photograph cloud shadows being cast on the Central Valley fields below.
“The Satellite Series was a complete break from the figurative movement,” Petersen said. “I wasn’t thinking of any style other than just saying, I need to change away from oil paint and explore what acrylic paint can do for me.”
When he returned to the Picnic Series about 10 years later, the idea of clouds and shapes passing over the fields carried over from the Satellite Series. The shadows of the umbrellas became like cloud shadows over the fields.
“I came back to the Picnic Series in the ’70s, and I'm still doing it — forever,” Petersen said, laughing. “I just enjoy the arrangement of still life material and then incorporating the idea of what’s happening on the tabletop into the landscape and into the tabletops. The fascinating thing for me was the cloud shadows that came over the tabletops and created all these shapes, they could be thought of as many different things besides cloud shadows.”
Living a quiet, loving, happy life
Petersen paints every day and, for much of his life, he spent all hours of daylight, from sunrise until sunset —with a break for lunch — working on his art. Since last year, that time has reduced but Petersen still paints each morning and afternoon.
The protection and support provided by his wife, Caryl, has helped him make so much time to paint. Since they met at Dillon Beach in 1985, Caryl has acted as a buffer to Petersen, taking on both the monotonous and stressful parts of their daily lives — everything from cooking his meals to being an emotional buffer for her friendly but introverted husband.
“He can just do what he does, and there’s no pressure from any place,” Caryl said. “We’re very introverted. We stay with each other — and we’ve never had an argument.”
She added, “Nobody’s going to bother him or pressure him in any way and, I think, that’s part of the reason he’s so old, because he has no pressures on him. That’s what I do. I make sure that he gets healthy meals, and that’s really important. He exercises, and he has no stress — or as little as humanly possible.”
Her husband dotes on her as well, full of appreciation for his partner, companion, lover and muse. Petersen bragged about her hat making, her experimental yet delicious cooking, her artistic ability, intelligence and business acumen.
“It’s been a wonderful 40 years — we get along so well,” Petersen said. “It’s been a happy life.”