A Pause for Beauty:
An Artist’s Journal
Seeing Beneath the Reality We See
Nathan Oliveira’s Two Wings (above) and Standing Figure (below)
Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits, nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.
- H.L. Mencken
The first wing I painted was too much like a wing. It wasn't the symbol I was searching for. So I kept abstracting this. I was painting good paintings, but it wasn't what I had in my mind. I hung three sixteen-foot paintings side by side on the wall of this big studio I had. I began to see the huge arch, the leading edge of the wing, the curve that represents lift. That became an abstraction of a wing. The ultimate abstraction of the Wing. So I began to work with that. I began to come to a conclusion.
- Nathan Oliveira, figurative artist. Heron Dance Interview
Nathan Oliveira's search for an abstraction, for a symbol that made a hawk's wing something other than a hawk wing and also an embodiment of the hawk's elegance, grace and power offers a profound insight into the creation of art.
We look to art to gain a new way of seeing things, a new experience of life, of nature, or of whatever. We look to artists for a glimpse into the reality underlying the reality we see. The distinct reality glimpsed but momentarily through the haze of imagination.
I interviewed Oliveira in about 2000, ten years before his death. At that time, he was deep into the creation of Windhover Contemplative Center, a museum for his hawk paintings on the Stanford University Campus. There are photos of that center, and more excerpts from my interview of him here.