Top 8 Quotes & Sayings by Nathan Oliveira

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American painter Nathan Oliveira.
Last updated on December 25, 2024.
Nathan Oliveira

Nathan Oliveira was an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor, born in Oakland, California to immigrant Portuguese parents. Since the late 1950s, Oliveira has been the subject of nearly one hundred solo exhibitions, in addition to having been included in hundreds of group exhibitions in important museums and galleries worldwide. He taught studio art for several decades in California, beginning in the early 1950s, when he taught at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. After serving as a Visiting Artist at several universities, he became a Professor of Studio Art at Stanford University.

What I'm concerned about now is creating a metaphor for what the figure really is.
If a figure doesn't look back at you, you forget it.
Though I have considerable interest in Europe and in traveling, I am most content with simply working and allowing the world that I'm creating to unfold before my eyes. — © Nathan Oliveira
Though I have considerable interest in Europe and in traveling, I am most content with simply working and allowing the world that I'm creating to unfold before my eyes.
See the first stroke as a start and everything after that a recovery.
I am not the avant-garde. I am the artist who comes after the advancing guard. I am more concerned with continuity of ideas and tradition than in inventing a unique imagery.
The gesture must be correct. If the gesture is correct, your mind really creates the reality of the figure, and it is not necessary to hang on all the rest [of the details].
I had the desire to paint the figure without actually painting the figure.
For me, painting is that magical material, that beautiful stuff that was invented, the ground-up pigments in oil which makes it very malleable. It can be manipulated and changed, darkened, lightened, given different hues and colors, so that by manipulating this material somehow I can find that figure I'm looking for, that figure that represents all the issues I'm bringing up and addressing.
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