Document text
Extract energy within Artist's work at SOU shows the relation of humanity, form By BILL VARBLE Mail Tribune By the late 1980s, Nathan Oliveira had struggled with the artist's equivalent of writer's block on and off for years. You wouldn't know it to look at the nudes in the San Francisco Bay Area artist's elegant "Imi" series, which he created coming out of that time. It's all wrapped up in the reason he paints the figure. "By connecting with humans there's a kind of relevance," he says. "When I'm lucky, things resonate. It makes me feel more convinced about what I'm doing." Oliveira, 73, is counted in the Bay Area Figurative group that includes such artists as Richard Diebenkorn. He came to national attention in 1959, when his work was included in the New York Museum of Modern Art's "New Images of Man" exhibit, and he taught for many years at Stanford University. An exhibit of four series of nudes by Oliveira opened Friday at Southern Oregon University's Schneider Museum, with media ranging from watercolor and charcoal to aquatints. If the works have a common quality, it's a haunting sense of something beyond their physical reality. In a telephone interview from his home in the Bay Area, Oliveira says he's not particularly interested in issues of form. "I don't worry if the nose is the right shape," he says. "I'm more interested in the energy, what it conveys about humans. I try to extract out of the encounter with the model the energy she has." Oliveira was born in 1928 to parents of Portuguese heritage. In the 1950s, his circle included such artists as Elmer Bischoff and David Parks and writers such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti. "In the '50s, when we first got attention, it was a very independent time," he says. "Artists weren't concerned about going to New York City. I think California's always been that way. "You had the beat poets, so incredibly full of energy and ideas. It simply all contained the energy of being in San Francisco. If we were to go to New York it would have changed everything. "We were kind of like priests up to about 1957." That's when his works started selling. They hang now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney. When Oliveira was a young artist, Abstract Impressionism ruled the American art world, but he always kept his own beat. "I was never an abstract person," he says. "I couldn't do things simply formal or totally invented. I had to connect with fundamental issues." By the 1960s he was having the first of creative blockages that would plague him occasionally for years. "They're so treacherous," he says. "We keep making them bigger." The blocks had to do with painting, not with drawing from life. In fact, he found his response to the human figure was a perfect antidote to the introspective ramblings of a young painter wanting to be the next Willem de Kooning. "It took me out of my own head," he says. One day in 1988, a graduate student of Oliveira's named Imi Hwangbo, a sculptor, said she needed money. "Why don't you model for me," Oliveira said. In a week, he produced more than 100 studies of her. Some of the ones in the exhibit are quite sensual, while others follow the feel of a shape or a gesture almost to the point of becoming human Rorschach blots. In such works, Oliveira functioned in the moment, leaving his critical side - and his blocks - behind. "It was such a great experience," he says. "Just a really good moment. She gave a lot of her energy." Rather than analyzing, he felt tuned in. Reaching out, he made quick, almost instinctive marks as his favorite music, say, a Bach cello suite, played in the background. Other works in the exhibit include a recently completed series titled "Santa Fe Nudes" and prints made at Crown Point, the famed art printing studio in San Francisco. As is the case in the Imi studies, the figures are never placed in a context or environment. Rather, they float in a vibrant void, inviting us to respond to the human moment. Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or e-mail [email protected] Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.