Crown Point Press

Crown Point Press is pleased to announce five new prints by celebrated Bay Area artist Nathan Oliveira. One of these, Rocker, anchors an exhibition at Crown Point Gallery that also includes four large drawings the artist created by intricately working over photolithographs created in 1995.

The new etchings maintain past themes in Oliveira’s work, the exploration of the human figure and the use of animal imagery. His interest in the “whole world of red” is abundantly apparent in three very large etchings each of which boasts a figure brilliantly shrouded in ochre and sienna reds. Oliveira lightly seasoned the prints with delicate borders and, in one of them, geometric shapes that subtly infuse the works with yellows, greens, and blues. Two smaller prints are figures against earth-colored backgrounds.

The large prints are titled Rocker, Standing Figure and Bird. In Rocker and Standing Figure, Oliveira uses spit bite and soap ground aquatints to create rich hues and strong, bold contours. While the figure in Standing Figure is firmly anchored on the ground, the figure in Rocker is unstable with her legs extended in mid-stride. Rocker is a continuation of a series of prints and paintings in which a nude figure stands on a rocker. Oliveira has said that the Rocker group is about “moving back and forth, keeping your balance.”

In Bird, a large drypoint bird is perched on a delicate branch. Oliveira has long explored the relationships between humans and animals, often drawing animal heads over human profiles. The bird’s head is in profile while its body faces the viewer, giving it the air of an ancient Egyptian deity.

Oliveira was born in 1928 in Oakland, California to a family of Portuguese immigrants. He studied painting and printmaking at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now the California College of the Arts) in Oakland, and in the summer of 1950 with Max Beckmann at Mills College in Oakland. After two years in the U.S. Army as a cartographic draftsman, he began teaching painting in 1955 at CCAC and drawing and printmaking at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute). He held a tenured teaching position at Stanford University from 1964 until he retired in 1995. He lives in Stanford, California.

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