[7][4] After graduation college in 1950, Petersen made his way east to study with Hans Hoffman School of Fine Arts in Provincetown.
Roland would return again the following summer of 1951 after a sojourn in Europe studying for six months with the printmaker Stanley William Hayter.
Vestiges of Hofmann's approach, including his conviction that "every deep artistic expression is a product of a conscious feeling for reality," are present in Petersen's works of the early 1950s.
Roland Petersen was a part of the Bay Area Figurative Movement—a mid-20th Century art movement made up of a group of artists in the San Francisco Bay Area who abandoned working in the prevailing style of Abstract Expressionism in favor of a return to figuration in painting during the 1950s and onward into the 1960s.
Four Person Exhibition with David Park, Elmer Bischoff and Joan Brown, Bednarz and Heritage Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 1966 Contemporary American Artists in the White House, White House, Washington, DC 1964 Painting and Sculpture Today, Herron Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN 1962 68th Denver Annual, Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO 1961 National Watercolor Exhibition, Peoria, IL 1960 First Winter Invitational, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, CA 1956 San Francisco Art Association Invitational, M.H.