Nathan Oliveira. Bird Watching

Nathan Oliveira, Raptor I, 1986. Oil on canvas, 60 x 52 inches.

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Nathan Oliveira was a keen observer of birds. The hawks and falcons that soared above the foothills near Stanford’s campus captured the artist’s imagination. When one of Oliveira’s students gave him a stuffed kestrel discarded from the Stanfords ornithological collection, the artist began using it as a model, creating realistic studies in watercolor, gouache, and oil.¹ He collected feathers and various species of taxidermied birds. At one point, a nest of kestrels inhabited a neighboring studio at Stanford; “One day,” described Oliveira, “while at the easel, I noticed something fly down past my shoulder and sit on the floor. It was a small kestrel, which had entered my space through an opening in the studio wall. It was exhausted, and there I stood, eyeball to eyeball, with this magnificent creature.”² Beginning in 1970, Oliveira became preoccupied with raptors as a subject matter. By the 1980s, he produced increasingly abstract images of wings, which culminated in the “Windhover” paintings—a series of large-scale meditative abstractions on flight made in the 1980s and 90s.³