[2][10] In 1976, he rented a cheap ($75 per month for 2,500 square feet) downtown Los Angeles loft in a former garment factory between Skid Row and Little Tokyo, and helped to jumpstart what Peter Plagens called a "scruffily energetic artists’ milieu," documented in Steven Seemayer’s film, "Young Turks.

"[2][4][18][5] Some Los Angeles writers credit Peterson, Michael Tansey and Seemayer with pioneering the development of the downtown arts district—including the emergence of LACE—after they began renting and subdividing warehouse buildings and subleasing them as live-in studios to artists.

[16][27] Richard Armstrong described his early work, which included painting, sculpture and installation, as exploring field-situation and body-object relationships and "marked by a consistently cool temperament" toward the effect its non-conventional approaches produced.

[15][29][30][31] His "Negentropic Spaces" series (1976) used layered vellum sheets with strings and paint sandwiched between; they alternated between flatness and illusionism and recalled the graphs and structural plans of his engineering background.

[16] This work subverted notions of the art object by eschewing foregrounds and embracing a fluid relationship dependent on chance and improvisation, in which what happened in front of the piece became its subject.

[2][1][15] Portable and playfully painted in bright primary colors, they took diverse forms: flattened tubes, a triangular plane with two splayed legs, a small igloo, a curved lean-to, a long wedge supported by converging chain link fences, and tents designed be inflated by subway and underground exhaust grates.

"[24] Village Voice critic Carrie Rickey observed that the work's blending of architecture and landscape—like that era's “site constructions”[36]—expanded sculpture into the realm of the practical and gave something back, rather than merely appropriating urban suffering.

[15] However, as Constance Mallinson wrote, ultimate ownership was, “dictated entirely by the ecology of the street—with no attempts at upkeep or replacement—their impermanence underscoring the fragility of life and dystopian dimensions of modern cities.

[3][16][38][32] However, with the Africa series (2008–16),[39] his paintings became more semi-abstract, multi-hued and hallucinatory, with Vuillard- and Bonnard-like landscapes and politically inspired canvasses drawn from newspaper photos (e.g., the Arab Spring- and movie-inspired The Battle of Algiers works) depicting featureless, phantasmagorical figures in disorienting patterned and expressionist environments, as in Springtime (2011).

[14][38] He translates her drawings (of celebrities, friends, dolls) into expressionist images that range from humorous to haunting, freakish or surreal, freely mixing a modernist repertoire of geometric shapes, color field bands, and gestural brushwork.

[14][16][30] Constance Mallinson describes these enigmatic works as "assisted readymades" that "provoke a tension between Modernism’s grand narratives and the personal idealism and quirky visions of the 'other' as denoted by this young woman.