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Peter Vandenberge was born in The Netherlands in the city of Voorburg, a suburb of The Hague, in 1935. His father was a geologist working for Royal Dutch (Shell Oil) and was sent to Java to work. The family joined him in 1936 when Peter was 6 months old.
Some of Peter's earliest memories are those of the flat shadow puppet and the wajang puppet ( three dimensional puppets) shows in Indonesia. These puppets would often turn to the audience and ask questions, talk directly to or otherwise involve the audience to move the story along. He also recalls that they went into houses and things happened in the houses. Not only was tehre interaction between people and animals, but objects also seemed to interact. This imagery would later manifest itself in Peter's work.
WWII reached Indonesia and in 1942, at the age of 5, Peter and his family were imprisoned in the first of three concentration camps.
Occasionally, Peter would drop hints about the desperate conditions in these camps; his mother having to trade a diamond ring for a single egg, or acts of kindness like the guard at the Adek Camp (the second camp the family was moved to), who smuggled paper and pens to Peter and a friend in exchange for the drawings they made, but generally Peter's friends at TB-9 thought it not polite to ask about or press for details of his camp experiences.
In
1945 the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and as Peter puts it, "The
atom bomb saved my ass." The Japanese left Indonesia and its government
to the Dutch and all the weapons to the Indonesians who then used them in
a revolution against the Dutch. The family was free from the conditions
in the concentration camps but were now dodging bullets by revolutionaries
who were actively targeting the Dutch population.
The family finally was able to board a DC-3 which took them to Point Darwin, Australia and from there they went to Brisbane and then to Katomba where it was decided that the now 10 year old Peter would board at St. Bernard's College, a Catholic school, to learn English. Peter had a difficult time at St. Bernard's.
"We had to get up at 5:00 am every day, then there was an hour of prayer, a cold shower, a bowl of oatmeal and then school."
Not only was Peter not Catholic but he had no concept of religion, being brought up in concentration camps. His inability to understand what went on at the school went far beyond his inability to understand English. After throwing a brick through a window, he was dismissed.
The family moved back to The Netherlands in 1946. During this time, Peter made "some puppet things" out of clay which he would put on coals overnight to harden. Meanwhile, Peter's father made a series of work related trips to The U.S.
The family moved to The U.S. in 1950 where his father worked
developing the oil fields in 
Bakersfield,
California. After attending one semester of high school in Bakersfield,
Peter attended Bakersfield Jr. College where he took art classes. He started
California State University at Sacramento in 1957 and as a condition of
graduating in 1960 with a BA, he student taught at McClatchy High in Sacramento
for one semester.
He went back to The Netherlands for about a half year, attented Holland Free Academy, returned and "hung out". He met Robert Arneson at The State Fair while Bob was demonstrating throwing and sculpting and Bob said, "Come on over!" So, in 1962, Peter came on over to The University of Californa at Davis and became Bob's first graduate student.
David (Gilhooly) describes the first time he saw Peter, "There were a couple of us standing in awe around Peter. We were watching him throw. He did it so quickly and easily. I wanted to say something to him. So, I went up to him and asked if he was a professional potter and he said, 'No.'".
In 1963 he graduated with an MA in painting, even though he had been sculpting his entire time at Davis. The only degree in art offered at UCD, until circa 1967, was in painting. Peter whipped up a bunch of paintings three weeks before his master's show to finish his degree.
As David puts it, "That's just how Peter works, last minute. Even now,
when he has a show, he shows up at the gallery with work that's still warm
from the kiln and often spontaneously finalized in some fashion. But, he
always got into all of the
juried shows and he always won all of the prizes or that's the way it seemed
to me. He didn't make a lot and he always made it last minute but it was
always perfect."
He was then hired by Tio Giambruni to help in the foundry in TB-9 until 1966. Perhaps because of the geology background of his father, Peter was able to develop the non-explosive, non-cracking (in the kiln) formula for the whiteware clay that he, Arneson, Gilhooly, Unterseher and Dodd used to make the so-called Funk Ceramics. The addition of Perlite to the existing low-fire talc and kaolin formula that Bob developed not only stablized, but helped to lighten the otherwise heavy clay body. This was also around the time that the first pieces incorportating jungle-like foliage started to appear.
From 1966-73, Peter taught at California State University at San Francisco. David Gilhooly would make frequent trips from Davis to see Peter. On one of these occassions the two went to a farmer's market together. The abundance and the variety of vegetables made such a deep immpression on Peter that, "I got the idea that I could make them out of clay".
In 1973, Peter started teaching at California State University at Sacramento with a summer school job at Alfred University in 1974. He taught at CSUS until retiring.
Created 07 February 2008