From Inspiration to Abstraction
A review of Nathan Oliveira: Muse at Pamela Walsh Gallery in Palo Alto, California.
“We had a joke at Yaddo,” recalls artist Imi Hwangbo, “that you don’t want to go to studio and find a note from the muse: I was here. Where were you?” Hwangbo, now a professor at the Lamar Dodd School of Art in Athens, Georgia, knows from personal experience how crucial the presence of a muse in an artist’s studio can be. In 1989, while a graduate student in sculpture at Stanford University, Hwangbo served as model and muse for Nathan Oliveira (1928–2010) a versatile artist four decades older than her who was seeking a change in direction. She provided the human spark he needed for inspiration at a transitional moment.
Posing in Oliveira’s airy studio for numerous oil paintings and over 100 works on paper, Hwangbo helped Oliveira achieve something paradoxical. The Imi series allowed Oliveira to reconnect with his most enduring and important subject—the human figure—while moving it gradually towards abstraction. As Oliveira once commented in an interview: “You have to deal with the figure and look at it as a composition, a pictorial composition of nice movement and manipulation of space.”
The wash drawings on paper that make up Nathan Oliveira: Muse at the Pamela Walsh Gallery in Palo Alto—which includes works from three different series—show how Oliveira responded to the forms of his models in ways that suited his idiosyncratic methods and formal concerns. He painted their energies rather than their particulars.
Oliveira, who was very sensitive to shifts in medium and materials, had devoted considerable effort to sculpture and large oil paintings in the mid-1980s and by the end of the decade he was ready to explore other media. The artist had been hoarding a ream of 60 year old Fabriano Exportazione paper and the Imi series gave him the opportunity to employ watercolor, charcoal and touches of gouache on the brittle sheets of vintage Italian rag paper. Using a resevoir-handled water brush that left puddles and blotches in his washes, Oliveira painted briskly. “I just did them,” he later recalled. “She’d take a pose. I’d do another one, maybe two. Then I’d have her change, then do another. We’d work for a couple of hours.”
Oliveira’s fluid, improvisational approach to the figure let him suggest both the aliveness of the model and his own response to that aliveness. Well aware that his work had more to say about his own way of seeing than the appearance of an individual, Oliveira worked in series while staying open to revelations and accidents, letting some figures spill out of their silhouettes into vaporousness. Editing came later. Only some works left Oliveira satisfied and he would later select maybe two out of ten works to be shown.
In the 1990s Oliveira spent time in the American Southwest, drawing inspiration from the local colors, making friends and conducting annual workshops at the Santa Fe Art Institute. The suite of Santa Fe Nudes he made for a 1999 workshop there are related to the Imi series, but display a greater variety of poses including many horizontal compositions. “When you are standing it is more difficult to dramatize the form,” Oliveira observed, and his Santa Fe Nudes—sometimes cropped by the edges of the paper—recline, tumble in space and even turn upside down. The wall of works at on display at Oliveira’s 1999 Santa Fe workshop (shown below) gives some idea of the invention and concentrated energy that the now seventy year old artist was able to generate with his serial approach.
If the Crown Point Nudes on view at the Pamela Walsh Gallery share some of the spontanaeity of the Santa Fe Nudes there is a good reason for it: they were made as “rehearsals” for a series of etchings that Oliveira executed at the Crown Point Press. Dancelike in their poses and isolated by the open paper that surrounds them, the Crown Point Nudes have a kind of controlled elegance that Oliveira had worked towards for decades. Despite their apparent informality, they are mature, focused works that summarize the artist’s long engagement with the figure.
Oliveira is often mentioned as a Bay Area Figurative artist, but he had very different aims from the group’s founders: David Park, Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff. They liked composing figures in space, while Oliveira was always attracted to the expressive potential of isolated figures. Although he drew with them early on, and was a close friend of Diebenkorn, Oliveira was artistically independent and very much on his own path.
As the elegant and highly original works on view in Nathan Oliveira: Muse demonstrate, Oliveira was essentially an abstract artist who used the figure as a vehicle to draw out and mirror his own inwardness. “She is you and you are her,” he once advised a student. “Paint her from the inside.” Many of Oliveira’s figures have impossible proportions, as he cared greatly about flow and gesture, but not about anatomical accuracy. Similarly unconcerned about the changing fashions of the art world, he was tuned in to his muses and the responsive energies they inspired in him. Whenever a muse was present, Oliveira was there too, paying rapt attention, ready to let his imagination break free.
Nathan Oliveira: Muse, Selected Works from the Estate
The Pamela Walsh Gallery Palo Alto
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