Gary Petersen’s playful inventiveness and off-kilter color are informed by long-standing fascinations with nature, biology, comics, space exploration, and ‘60s sci-fi. His favorite artists include Emma Kunz, Robert Delaunay, Lyubov Popova, Lorser Feitelson, Helen Lundeberg, and Mary Heilmann, to name a few. I spoke with Gary on the occasion of his participation in two group shows, “There are No Giants Upstairs” at Theodore: Art in Bushwick and “Cannonball!” at Frosch & Portmann in the Lower East Side.

Petersen’s studio at The Marie Walsh Sharpe Program in 2011

Kris Scheifele: You’re so widely exhibited, it would be hard for any NY gallery- goer to have missed seeing your work in person. For those who aren’t so fortunate, would you describe your process?

Gary Petersen: I’ve always worked on both stretched canvas and on wood or masonite panels, but since my residency at The Marie Walsh Sharpe Program (2010-2011), the smaller panel works have dominated my time. They have this presence about them, but they’re not in your face. You have to engage with them, you have to come up close to start the conversation.

The canvases are done with oils, but with the panels, I started to use acrylics and sometimes ink washes over them, which I then go back over with acrylics. So there’s this duality between the hard edge and the hazy wash over it. This idea came from some works on paper I was doing at the time.

For me, the effect of the washes is of something fading—memory, time, etc.— but then I go back and paint lines that either echo or contradict the original structure. Unfortunately, digital images flatten everything out making the work appear more graphic than it is. Subtleties of texture and brushstroke don’t come through.

KS: That echoing and the repetition of your economical geometry reminds me of Eadweard Muybridge somehow, as though you’re ‘fixing’ one fleeting configuration after another.

GP: Muybridge, interesting take, hadn’t thought about him. Trying to fix something fleeting is there in the recent work. I’m interested in the moment when things are becoming or the opposite, falling apart. Geometry and hard-edge are seen as very rigid. I like to soften things a bit without being brushy or messy.

KS: Yeah, even though you use tape and a ruler, your work has none of the slick precision characteristic of some geometric abstraction. It also isn’t the loosey-goosey provisional painting we’re seeing so much of these days. Why is a little bit of imperfection important to you?

GP: Well, I don’t want to fully remove myself from the work, but I don’t want it to be just about the mark or gesture either. I like you to feel the line as well as see it.

KS: What informs your compositional decisions?

GP: The compositions are intuitive, improvisational, but there’s always a starting point in my mind: the head, the figure, legs, doorways, boundaries. I have a loose idea based on drawings, but I don’t often refer to them directly.

KS: Ah, the body as architecture, both are enclosures of space. And yours is very ambiguous threshold space: inside flips into outside, up is down, almost in an M.C. Escher kind of way. It’s not clear whether you’re coming or going. Did any architecture out in the world influence you?

Passage, 2011, acrylic, colored pencil & oil on masonite panel, 20x16in

GP: Not specifically, but growing up with sci-fi movies and Star Trek and an interest in the “structure” of outer space certainly had its impact on me. I followed the space launches as a kid. I watched every Apollo launch. Also, the body as architecture, as cell structure. I took a lot of biology courses as an undergrad. I guess all of that’s in there.

KS: Sounds like Carl Sagan’s Cosmos might’ve been right up your alley. That show put it all in perspective.

GP: I saw Carl Sagan speak. He came to Penn State when I was there.

KS: Where you were studying pre-vet?

GP: Yes, pre-vet—very similar to a pre-med curriculum.

KS: Lots of looking through microscopes, getting up close. That, coupled with your fascination with outer space, brings the very large and the very small together in a single image, as though you’re compressing Powers of Ten, the classic Eames film from the ‘70s.

GP: Switching scale is interesting to me: the large wall paintings to the small works on paper all in the same room and that the drawings are both small in scale and expansive at the same time. I like dualities, contradictions; it’s what makes the world, and us, interesting.

KS: And then there’s your fantastic color. How has that developed?

GP: It’s just kind of inside of me. I play with it and observe colors out there in the world, then I work. It’s just what I’m attracted to. I try not to overanalyze it. Certainly my color sense has changed and grown over the years. I keep trying to push it.

KS: Is it significant that you’ve been favoring the vertical canvas lately?

GP: It has been my favorite for many years. The vertical relates more to the body and the mind for me; it feels more active and alive. The horizontal feels too much like landscape, too restful.

KS: Do the vertical works serve as a sort of self-portraiture?

GP: I hope the work is embedded with a piece of me and my life experiences. I hope there’s some poetry or emotional content that comes through as well.

Gary Petersen holds a BS from Pennsylvania State University and an MFA from The School of Visual Arts. Besides his 2010–2011 tenure at The Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Space Program, past awards include The New Jersey State Council on the Arts Painting Fellowship for 2011, 2002 and 1993 as well as a 1988 Edward F. Albee Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship. Petersen’s extensive exhibition history includes solo shows at Michael Steinberg, NY, Fusebox, DC, Genovese/Sullivan Gallery, Boston, and White Columns, NY. His group shows include Lori Bookstein Gallery, Allegra La Viola Gallery, The Painting Center, Sue Scott Gallery, Bronx River Art Center, McKenzie Fine Art, Janet Kurnatowski, Geoffrey Young Gallery, Nicole Klagsbrun, Edward Thorp Gallery, and Storefront Gallery. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, The New York Sun, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Partisan Review. He currently lives in Hoboken, NJ and works in his studio at The Elizabeth Foundation in NYC.