"Composite Head"

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(1972)

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"Composite Head" (1972), lithograph, 755x570mm; 29 3/4" x 22 1/2", with full margins. Signed, dated, titled and numbered 6/10 in pencil, lower margin, in excellent condition.  Printed and published by the Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque, New Mexico, with the watermark and blind stamp lower right recto, from the private collection of June Wayne, artist and founder of the Tamarind Lithography Workshop.

By 1960, lithographic workshops had all but disappeared in America.  There were few master printers and it was only with the greatest difficulty that an artist could engage in lithography. In 1960, June Wayne who created the first systematic program for training artists, developing technical processes and setting modern standards for American lithography, established the Tamarind Lithography Workshop.  The Tamarind was immeasurably successful worldwide in developing master printmakers whose works today reside in the world's most prestigious venues.

Nathan Oliveira (1928-) was born in Oakland, California. At the California College of Arts and Crafts he studied with the figurative painter Otis Oldfield and developed an Expressionist figural style, influenced by Oska Kokoschka, Max Beckmann and German Expressionism. Later, influenced by Richard Diebenkorn's work, Oliveira saw how the painterly immediacy of Abstract Expressionism could interpret concrete visual experiences. It was while teaching at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco that he shared ideas with his colleagues Elmer Bischoff, Theophillis Brown and James Weeks, who followed the example of David Park, applying gestural painting techniques to the figure, still life and landscape. Oliveira soon developed his signature figurative style, representing a single figure or head in an ambiguous space activated by brushstrokes.

Throughout the 1970s and into the 1990s, Nathan Oliveira produced many collaborative prints at workshops throughout America, including the Tamarind Institute where he was an artist-fellow.  In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Oliveira produced lithographs depicting disembodied heads emerging from darkness, images derived from the 19th century lithographer Eugene Carriere.  These images are both mysterious and evocative in a painterly manner, as is this work, "Composite Head".

Nathan Oliveira's lithograph "Composite Head" is in a large 37 5/8" x 45 1/8" with an aged red/silver and metallic leaf undertone, textured highlights in red and black painted and refinished to expose streaking, cracking and voids, pyramid shaped with rounded raised lip frame.  The undulating ribbed wood fillet is handcrafted in Italian cocoa. The 6-ply ivory black outer and 4-ply stone inner acid and lignin free mats are protected with Acrylite-AR OP3 (UV) by CYRO ...  $3,000.00