Nathan Oliveira

I'd like to meet:

Music:

Classical, Jazz, Frank Zappa and Mothers of Invention, anything 60's and New Age (especially while painting) My students turned me onto that.

Movies:

Anything that makes me think and adds to my life in 3 hours or less. Below is a very nice interview done a year ago.
Get this video and more at MySpace.com

Television:

Normally I like to work in studio, but you can only take so much. I do not watch the news anymore, to corrupted by big business.

Books:

This article was taken directly from Stanford Online. All rights are reserved to Stanford Magazine, writer Diane Rogers and photographer Glenn Matsumura. All rights reserved for follow up article by John Seed and Stanford Magazine. The piece was published in late 2002.

The Color of His Dreams

Master artist Nathan Oliveira contemplates creation, imagination and the big picture.

by Diane Rogers

Photography by Glenn Matsumura

SEEING THINGS: Oliveira considers his work a vehicle for viewers to create their own metaphors.
FOR MORE THAN 40 YEARS, Nathan Oliveira has been hiking to the Dish and beyond, on the lookout for kestrels and red-tailed hawks. An emeritus professor of art and a painter of international renown, he finds plenty of inspiration for his canvases in the Stanford Foothills.

Mona, his wife of 51 years, is always at Oliveira’s side, and over the decades they’ve been joined by a tag-along retinue of children, grandsons and rottweilers. Almost anything can happen on the family forays, like the afternoon Oliveira came practically eyeball-to-brown-eyeball with a bird he’d never seen up close—a magnificent golden eagle. “It came up over a rise, not more than four feet off the ground, then flew up and down the side of the hill,” he recalls. “It was just incredible.”

That eagle’s 7-foot wingspan is on luminescent view in the Windhover project, a series Oliveira has been working on since the 1970s. Named for British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’s The Windhover: To Christ Our Lord, the artist’s small drawings of birds have morphed over the decades into six monumental oils of wings and curves that measure up to 17 feet across. “Painting actual wings just didn’t do it for me,” Oliveira says about his early efforts. “So I had to go through a period of transition, from wings to abstract images that conveyed the idea of wings without getting all trapped up in feathers. It’s really about the imagination and the inner spirit of flight.”

Some of those wing paintings are included in Nathan Oliveira, a touring retrospective exhibition of almost 70 paintings, monotypes, watercolors and sculptures. The show will be at the Palm Springs (Calif.) Desert Museum through January 5, the Orange County Museum of Art from April 15 through June 15, and the Tacoma (Wash.) Art Museum from July through November 2003.

“Like a great poet who never resorts to storytelling, there is always something intangible yet highly evocative hovering beneath the surface,” critic Julia Chiapella wrote about Oliveira’s work for the website MetroActive when the show opened at the San Jose Museum of Art in February. His human figures, she added, “are solitary creatures that abide resolutely in an uncertain world so vast it is better left to the imagination.”

RAPTOR RAPTURE: Fascination with the form and the flight of birds of prey inspired Oliveira's expansive Windhover series.

Peter Selz, professor emeritus of art at UC-Berkeley and curator of the show, says many critics have commented on the mist and mystery in Oliveira’s work and find it difficult to categorize him. “They always want to say, ‘He belongs there or over there,’ but he has never belonged anywhere, which is something I really like.”

A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Design, Oliveira, 73, is often grouped with the Bay Area Figurative School—alongside Elmer Bischoff, Richard Diebenkorn, ’44, and David Park—which in the 1950s moved away from abstract expressionism and toward paintings of figures and landscapes. After teaching at Cornell and UCLA, Oliveira accepted a tenured Stanford professorship in 1964 from art department chair Lorenz Eitner and taught painting and printmaking until his retirement in 1995.

Hank Hine, ’71, director of the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla., remembers taking a printmaking course one hot summer from Oliveira, who was turning out a series of lithographs titled To Edgar Allen Poe, 1970-71. Oliveira kept his favorite Charbonnel Noir Velours ink in a refrigerator so it wouldn’t soften and ruin the crisp tones of the lithograph in the non-air-conditioned studio. Hine recalls being awakened many mornings by a predawn phone call from Oliveira, urging him to join him in the studio. Hine and his fellow students went to Oliveira’s campus home for dinners and to play with the artist’s three children, Lisa, Gina and Joe. Hine was struck by the hand-painted walls and the special lighting for each objet d’art.

Hine says he continually learned from the perspective Oliveira brought to his own work. “Nate used to describe himself in a way that seems astute as we look back historically at the late 20th century,” Hine wrote in an essay for the Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution. “‘I’m not part of the avant-garde,’ he said. ‘I’m part of the garde that comes afterwards, assimilates, consolidates, refines.’”

Oliveira continued to have solo exhibitions in the United States and abroad while he was teaching, and his paintings now hang in major museums worldwide—New York, London, Melbourne, Paris, Stockholm. His oils are often distinguished by somber earth tones of mauve or ochre applied with a heavy impasto, or thick layering, while his watercolors appear to be brushed on quickly and reveal multiple washes of color.

Oliveira’s artistic achievements have won him numerous fellowships and grants—and in 1999 he received an award that was particularly meaningful to him: the degree of Commander in the Order of Infante D. Henrique, bestowed by the president of Portugal to honor those who have helped extend Portuguese culture. Oliveira grew up in the Bay Area as the only child of struggling immigrants from Portugal. In his grandmother’s apartment, where he lived with his divorced mother and his aunt, Oliveira drew typical little-boy pictures—soldiers, airplanes, men on horses. He took his first art lessons in high school, from a painter who churned out seascapes for the San Francisco tourist trade, and a chance visit to the Palace of the Legion of Honor set him on a lifelong course. Standing in front of Rembrandt’s portrait of Jooris de Caulcerii (1632), he decided that he, too, wanted to paint real people.

STARK STROKES: Antlers (2001) is among 70 works now touring.

“Even today, whenever I go to New York, I go to the Frick and stand in front of the Rembrandt self-portrait there and see a human, living presence and an energy that touches me,” Oliveira says. “It’s that presence that keeps me painting.”

While earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine arts at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, Oliveira was taken with the work of Northern European artists like Norway’s Edvard Munch—of The Scream fame—and he studied one summer with the German expressionist Max Beckmann. Critics have used the word “isolated” to describe the singular, stark, existential figures, often faceless and timeless, that Oliveira painted in those early years. But the crinkles in his smile dispel any notions of a dark and brooding artistic persona.

“It sounds pretty grim to be someone capable of painting figures in great angst,” he says, settling into a canvas director’s chair in his home studio. “I was certainly aware of German expressionism, and I had great affection for all of those painters. But I wasn’t trying to do the same thing.”

Oliveira simply wanted to paint. But it wasn’t always easy on $2.50-an-hour teaching jobs at the Richmond Art Center, at San Francisco’s Art Institute, and at his alma mater. “When Mona and I got married and had children, we weren’t making very much money,” he says. “After we’d get the bills paid, I’d say to her, ‘Well, how many tubes of paint can I get this week—one of red, or two of yellow?’”

In the mid-1950s, jazz icons Dizzy Gillespie and Stan Getz were blowing the lid off musical conventions—finding new sounds and beats in “what happens between the notes,” as Duke Ellington put it. In the waning days of abstract expressionism, says Oliveira, visual artists also were searching for new voices and visions. “It was a period when the act of painting was about physically moving your arm with a great deal of energy, and that act defined what the painting was going to be, and it was mostly [about] color and energy,” he recalls.

SPECTRAL: Italian Site #7 (1985).

Selz, who wrote the catalog for the current exhibition (Nathan Oliveira, UC Press, 2002), has been following the artist’s career since the late 1950s. For his own debut as curator of painting and sculpture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1958, Selz mounted New Images of Man, a show that challenged abstract expressionism’s dominance. In this exhibition of figurative paintings by such notables as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Oliveira, at 31, was the youngest painter included.

“Abstract expressionism was the going style then, but Oliveira’s lonely figures were painted in a new way, using vigorous brush work and finding the figure in the process of painting it,” Selz says. The author of Beyond the Mainstream (1997), a book about hard-to-categorize artists, Selz argues that Oliveira used abstract expressionism as a means and “went ahead to his own style.”

By the late 1960s, artistic journals and the popular press were touting Oliveira as an up-and-coming young artist. It was around this time that art dealer Paula Kirkeby moved to the Bay Area from the East Coast. Shortly after she opened Galerie Smith-Andersen in Palo Alto, Oliveira began dropping by to frame paintings, and one day he casually mentioned that her gallery would be a nice place to have a show. Eager to exhibit his work but assuming he’d be booked far in advance, she suggested, “Maybe a year from now?”

“‘Nothing sooner?’ Nate asked. And I said, ‘Next week?’ And suddenly we had a fabulous exhibition of his monotypes.”

BULLFIGHT: La Tauromaquia II, a 1973 monotype.

Kirkeby has published catalogs of Oliveira’s works, including his 1973 series of 90 monotypes based on Goya’s 1818 etching of a bullfight gone horribly wrong, La Tauromaquia 21. Monotype, a process left over from the heyday of abstract expressionism, combines drawing, painting and printmaking. The artist paints a design on a sheet of metal or glass and then transfers it to a sheet of paper. Typically, only one print is made, but Oliveira has the kind of fine touch that allows him to produce serial compositions from the ghost of the design that remains on the plate.

“He’s really among the top two or three most brilliant practitioners of the monotype,” says Hilarie Faberman, curator of modern and contemporary art at Stanford’s Cantor Center, which owns about 40 of Oliveira’s drawings, paintings, prints and sculptures. “If anyone can conjure up secret worlds out of paper and ink, it’s Nate.”

Faberman, who joined the Stanford museum staff in 1993, says she met Oliveira in one of the first public functions she hosted on campus. “I remember having to introduce him and being totally intimidated by an artist with such a national reputation,” she recalls. “It was such a surprise to find out that he was also extremely nice.” Collectors of Oliveira’s work, Faberman adds, “feel they know him personally, and you can’t say that about all artists.”

In 1995, Faberman curated The Windhover: Recent Wing Paintings and Related Works at the Stanford Art Gallery. At the heart of the exhibition were five 15- and 17-foot oils of increasingly abstract birds and wings that suggested arcs and curves—and whatever else they evoked for visitors. “I think the curves represent the curvature of our planet, suggesting that we’re all on this great ball together,” Oliveira says. “But a painting is also a vehicle. I set it up to the degree that it gives you something recognizable to interact with, and if you’re creative, you create your own metaphor.”

GOOD AT FIGURES: Nude with Red Leg (2001).

Oliveira continues to work on large paintings in a 40-by-40-foot studio in the Foothills, overlooking the 18th hole of the Stanford Golf Course. He composes smaller works in his home studio, where Rindi, the family’s latest rottweiler, keeps him company. The ashes of Rindi’s predecessor, the beloved Max, rest in a box on a table overflowing with sketches and paint tubes.

The studio is a recent addition to Oliveira’s meandering California ranch house, where a Japanese front gate leads to a Mexican door opening to a hallway graced with a French provincial clock and a crucifix from Arizona. Cultural objects from China’s Han dynasty, Cambodia and Thailand are spotlighted throughout the Oliveira home, and nearly 100 masks from India, Africa, Mexico, Central America and New Guinea hang on the living room walls.

Oliveira says he plans to complete three more oils for his Windhover project, and then he’d like to see all nine paintings collected in one place, on permanent display. He once considered finding a setting for them in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains in New Mexico, or perhaps somewhere in California’s Napa Valley. “But then I thought, this is an idea that has grown out of the Stanford Foothills, an idea that is dealing with nature [when] this university is growing and becoming huge and more and more impersonal. And I thought, let’s have it here.”

His dreams of a chapel-like retreat on campus, where people could go to view the Windhover paintings and stay for quiet reflection, have attracted considerable alumni support, but plans are currently on hold. Oliveira’s imagination, however, continues to soar, like his favorite kestrels. “I’ve always thought if I had wings, I could fly. Well, I do have wings in my mind . . . and these paintings are like a catalyst that can take you wherever you want your mind to fly.”

A Mentor and a Friend

By John Seed

When I walked into Nate Oliveira’s Monoprint class in my sophomore year, I had no idea I was walking straight into my future. Unlike so many of my friends, my major was “undecided.” To put it kindly, I was intellectually immature and lacked direction. Professor Oliveira was about to change that.

Teaching, at its best, is about transforming the way students think, and Oliveira changed my thinking forever by introducing me to a process-oriented way of problem solving. Monoprint is a printmaking method in which a quick painting is brushed, smudged and wiped onto a zinc plate, then pressed onto wet paper with an etching press. Although each image is unique, a faint “ghost” image remains after each impression. Oliveira encouraged us to treat each such image as the starting point for another print.

When he gave a slide show of his Tauromaquia monoprints, a seemingly endless series of themes and variations inspired by Goya, my jaw was dropped the whole time. Oliveira’s way of thinking was so stunningly flexible and inventive. A door was opening for me.

By the end of the semester, monoprint had become an obsession. When I wasn’t busy covering zinc plates with oily black etching ink, I was waiting on the bench in front of Oliveira’s office, ready to show him my latest work and bombard him with questions. As I explored the monoprint process, I could feel my curiosity growing, and I found myself improving as a student in all areas.

Nathan not only patiently answered my questions, he became a true mentor and friend. When my parents visited Stanford, he reassured them that I might indeed have a future as an art major. He invited me to his home, where he and Mona treated me as a guest and showed off the wondrous things they had collected. Sensing that I needed exposure to a larger range of artistic influences, not to mention some pocket money, Nathan prevailed on local modern art collector Hunk Anderson to hire me as an intern.

By junior year, I was spending Saturday mornings at Oliveira’s studio in an old theatre on Hamilton Avenue. As a paid assistant, I would stretch 6- and 7-foot-wide canvases and watch the progress of Oliveira’s oil paintings. I remember him laughing to find the imprints of my sneakers on the backs of the canvases I had stretched. When work was over, there might be milkshakes at the Peninsula Creamery.

That same year Nathan contacted his friend, the painter Richard Diebenkorn, and arranged for me to meet him in Southern California during Christmas break. When I look back at the connections and opportunities that came my way through Oliveira, I am humbled. He remained an encouraging presence even when I was not taking his courses. Hanging in my office today is a scrap of paper towel I once found on my easel after wrestling with an awkward painting for Frank Lobdell’s class. Brushed in dark viridian green oil paint, the message was simple: “Getting Better N.O.”

John Seed, ’79, is chair of art at Mt. San Jacinto College in Menifee, Calif.

Heroes:

Mother and Father and the museums and galleries that represent me Museum of Modern Art, N.Y.; Brooklyn Museum; Art Institute of Chicago; Oakland Museum of Art, California; Grunwold Center for Graphic Arts, UCLA; Honolulu Academy of Art. Terry Dintenfass Gallery, New York; Galerie Smith-Andersen, Palo Alto; Charles Campbell Gallery, San Francisco.