Hawaii

Nathan Oliveira

Nate Oliveira was a Visiting Artist at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1971. He began working in watercolor, doing a series of figurative paintings that are called the Hawaiian Series.

On page 71 of "Nathan Oliveira" by Peter Selz the author notes: "Oliveira continued working in watercolor and made a splendid series when he was visiting artist at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, in 1971. 'I had some beautiful oriental models there, but the color I came up with, these watercolors, the environment somehow became so much of the activity that I didn't know how colorful those things were until I got them back and they were screaming with tropics, exotic.'

Here the artist became the master of the watercolor, exploiting the transparent quality in the fluid medium....an image of luminous and poetic figuration emerges from an intimate collaboration between free forms of color..."

This image is of a nude woman standing in a doorway or perhaps before a mirror while an indistinct figure watches in the background. Oliveira used gouache, ink, varnish and possibly oil paint to create this work. The painting is also signed by the artist on the verso.