Origins of Flight:
The Windhover Studies by Nathan Oliveira
Pacific Art League and Triton Museum of Art
The exhibition Origins of Flight Windover is a collaborative showcase presented by the Pacific Art League in partnership with the Triton Museum of Art. As part of this collaboration, the Triton Museum will host the exhibit [Title], featuring an extensive collection of works by Nathan, [briefly describe the focus or theme of Titon's show].
Origins of Flight
Inspired by Nathan Oliveira’s Windhover series, which brings a sense of peace and renewal to the Stanford University campus, this exhibition offers a rare opportunity to explore the creative process behind these iconic works. Featuring pieces from Joe Oliveira’s collection, these paintings—created between 1974 and 1996—served as studies for the Windhover series. Rarely seen by the public, they offer a unique, intimate look at how one of Palo Alto’s most cherished artists deconstructed and abstracted his vision.
“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.”
Nathan Oliveira
About the artist
Nathan Oliveira was born in Oakland, California in 1928 to a family of Portuguese immigrants. He studied painting and printmaking at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) in Oakland, and in the summer of 1950 with Max Beckmann at Mills College. After two years in the U.S. Army as a cartographic draftsman, he began teaching painting at his alma mater and also at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco (now SFAI).
In 1959 Oliveira was the youngest painter included in the groundbreaking exhibi- tion New Images of Man, which included established artists such as Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacometti, held at MOMA in New York. He held a tenured teaching position at Stanford University from 1964 until he retired in 1995. Notably, Oliveira was a leading member of the Bay Area figurative movement.
During his career, surveys of his work were held at the Art Gallery of the University of California, Los Angeles (1963); Oakland Museum of California (1973); California State University, Long Beach (1980); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1984); California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco (1997); and the San Jose Museum of Art (2002). Oliveira was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994 and has received many other awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, two honorary doctorates, and, in 2000, membership in a distinguished order conferred by the government of Portugal.
Oliveira’s work is collected nationally and is held in the collections of many distin- guished institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Oliveira passed away in 2010 at his home in Palo Alto, California.
In the beginning
Oliveira did not follow a disciplined approach to painting or drawing but explored the spectrum of pure emotion and beauty achieved by gesture. Embedded throughout Oliveira’s artistic output is a probing of relationships between humanity, animals, and place–subjects he continually reworked and reimagined. At the heart of Oliveira’s painting and drawing is a powerful inter- play of representation and abstraction.
Oliveira loved the natural lands of Stanford University. For years he worked in an airy studio that boasted extraordinary vistas, north to San Francisco and south to San Jose.
In the afternoons, he would set out on long walks in the foothills, where he would encounter magnificent birds of prey that make their home at the campus’s edge: hawks, eagles, owls, and kestrels.
Oliveira began to include these birds in his canvases. In 1972, a student’s gift of a stuffed kestrel became a model for a series of drawings and paintings. These works would come in and out of the artist’s studio over the next two decades.
These works are “The Windhover”
Over the course of several decades, Nathan Oliveira's small drawings and paintings of birds evolved into six massive, breathtaking oils—each stretching up to 17 feet across. Reflecting on this transformation, Oliveira remarked, "Painting actual wings just didn’t feel right to me. I needed to move beyond that, into a period of transition, where I could convey the essence of wings without being tied to feathers." His shift to abstraction speaks to something deeper—"It’s really about the imagination, the inner spirit of flight. The curves in these works reflect the curvature of our planet, suggesting that we’re all on this great ball together."
In a chance encounter with Irish poet Desmond Egan, Nathan Oliveira invited him to his studio to view his paintings. Struck by their restorative energy, Egan felt an immediate connection. When Oliveira mentioned that the works were still untitled, Egan, moved by their grandeur, recited lines from Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem, The Windhover. The vast, powerful wings in the paintings had summoned the verse. That was it. "These works are The Windhover," Oliveira declared.
Oliveira kept the monumental canvases in his home studio, where they became a source of solace. As he faced personal challenges—losing his wife to cancer and grappling with his own declining health—these paintings remained a source of comfort, grounding him through it all. He continued working on them until the end of his life.