My usual venues at the university are the art museums, which are some of the first buildings you reach from the town side of campus. Windhover is a half mile across campus from there, away from town, and no cars are allowed in the the central section of the campus. To approach by car, it would be practical to enter the campus from the other end, but I wanted to see what lies between the museum and the meditation center, so I parked in my usual spot in front of the museum (The A-permit lot there is open to the public on week-ends), and made the distance on foot. A half-mile jaunt is not a big deal, but it is noticeably uphill, and the temperature was way too hot to be outdoors. It was well worth the effort though because the campus is so beautiful. Ancient spreading oaks offered welcome shade along the route between noble sandstone buildings. Lawns, courtyards, and wading pools were occupied by young adults playing with scampering children. There could hardly be a lovelier vision of utopia.
Windhover is almost hidden—its presence is so muted. The sign at the entrance is transparent, cut into a sheet of iron. The entrance is hidden behind a dark wall and a long row of lofty bamboo, shielding it from the busy campus.
The building is low, and has glass panels in certain sections. I arrived early, so I had time to walk around to the reflecting pool on the far end, and to look inside the building. I saw a great red canvas on the wall, and on the floor, two students, lying prone. They squirmed when they noticed me, but were undeterred in their "meditation."
I sat on a stone bench by the tall wooden front doors and waited. After a few minutes, two other women arrived, one at a time, each asking about the tour. And then two tiny, bent elders shuffled up the long, bamboo-lined path to the entrance. The man fussed around the card-reader getting the doors opened up, while the woman introduced herself as Lucky, and asked our names. Then we entered the sanctum.
The first gallery has a window wall that looks out on the reflecting pool, another wall features one grand red painting, and the third wall is formed by a divider and a low dark water feature.
Lucky wasn't very authoritative or informative about the site; what interested her was to know what we saw when we looked at the grand red painting, with its radiating impasto and its two perfect arcs. Each of us noticed different things, and that led to some discussion and further looking.
However in the course of our time with Lucky, we gradually learned the story of how Windhover came to be. The meditation center was the dream of artist Nathan Oliveira, who taught studio arts at Stanford for over 30 years, from 1964-1996. Lucky and her husband, who slumped mutely on a bench, had known the painter and his wife, because Lucky's husband had also been a professor there; the wives had met through the Faculty Wives Club. It was an honor to meet someone who had been close to the artist and to the project of establishing Windhover.
Nathan worked in the art department's studio up on Dish hill, on the back side of the campus. It had great views and access to trails. He took regular walks, and the landscape inspired a suite of huge abstract transcendental paintings. He did this series late in life, and kept the paintings as aids to meditation. They are said to have been a source of comfort to him during the losses and sufferings of old age, and he dreamed of bestowing that peace upon the Stanford community in the form of a meditation center featuring these works as vehicles to a transcendent state, like mandalas.
The next room has two paintings. One is a diptych that is very wide, at least six times the width of his own outspread arms, and bears the image of spread wings soaring.
On another wall is a canvas one third that size that bears only an arc, trailing glory in the form of creamy, glowing impasto.
A glass wall looks out into a shady grove.
Passing down a long, glass-walled hallway, we came to the final gallery, where a disgruntled student sat cross-legged, facing the grove.
Another glass wall showed a small gravel-lined court with a modest, silently flowing water feature.
The huge painting in this space looks like dawn to me, the essence of universal dawn.
Like the meditation center, this suite of paintings is known as 'Windhover.' The title was suggested by a visitor to Oliveira's studio, an Irish poet, who was inspired by the paintings to recite a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins by that title. Here's the first stanza:
I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Hopkins' poem is obscure, but basically it is a tribute to a type of bird known as a Windhover in some places, but in northern California is known as a kestrel, which is a type of falcon. Oliveira's paintings had, in fact, been inspired by the flights of the kestrels and hawks seen from the trails near his home, and so he adopted that title for the suite, not giving titles to the individual paintings.
Lucky pointed out that there was a long-standing debate among fans and meditators about the pronunciation of Windhover, whether WINdhover or wind-hover. I thought the former the most common, but she pointed out that hover is more poetic: the kestrel hovers in the wind.
When I said good-bye to Lucky and the professor emeritus, and the two other visitors, I felt quite elevated and enlightened. A passerby with a bicycle advised me not to miss the meditation garden, so I walked around to the area that is visible from inside. There I found a magnificent pepper tree, probably original growth, guarding and keeping the meditation center, and nearby a meditation maze worked in tile on the ground.
I headed straight for the Cool Café, the museum's order-at-the-counter eatery. Air conditioning, iced tea, and a juicy grilled chicken sandwich restored my strength.
I began to think about Nathan Oliveira again. I wanted to see examples of his usual work, which hadn't made a very big impression on me in the past. So I took a quick sprint around the upstairs gallery devoted to late 20th century and contemporary art. There I found one canvas.
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| Stelae #20, 1993 |
A stela is a stone memorial, so this image suggests overlapping grave markers, perhaps signifying a descent into death. This work from the 1990s is very late in the artist's career.
Making a final push, I went next door to the Anderson Collection at Stanford, where I discovered three more canvases by Nathan Oliveira.
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| Reclining Nude, 1958 |
This highly abstracted nude emerging from, or sinking into, obscurity, reminds us that Oliveira's reputation was originally as a member of the Bay Area figurative school, a group of painters who applied the techniques of Abstract Expressionism to the figure, as well as to landscapes and other subjects.
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| Stage #2 with Bed, 1967 |
After the bright and radiant images of Windhover, the dark palette of Oliveira's work in the 1950s and 1960s is shocking. This image of an empty stage in the dark seems to be a reference to death. Notice that in this work he uses a smooth, invisible brushstroke to create crisp lines and edges.
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| Nude in Environment I, 1962 |
This colorful work depicts a female nude looking toward us from an inner world swirling with ideas and emotions, or so I surmise.
By this time, I was worn out. I didn't have the energy to do either the Anderson or the Cantor justice. I couldn't explore any more of the campus's wonderful gardens and architecture. I just needed to rest—and to meditate on my findings.
When I looked at my photos of Oliveira's work, I could see that my sample was too small to indicate the nature of his art. I was also surprised by the darkness of the vision they projected. So I did a little online research. When Oliveira died, in 2010, at the age of 81, the New York Times neatly summed up his career. The obituary says that he was influenced by the dark visions of European artists like Edvard Munch, Oskar Kokoschka, and especially Max Beckmann. He was committed to expressing the dark side of human emotions.
The obituary in Stanford News pointed out that Oliveira's father, a Portuguese immigrant, drowned in the Russian River when Nathan was young, a fact that seems to explain a lot. The article points out that Oliveira described his artwork with the Portuguese word saudade, a feeling of yearning and nostalgia.
Here are a few more significant examples.
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| Standing figure with Hands on Belt, 1960 from WikiArt |
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| Standing Figure, 1970 from New York Times |
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| Untitled - Figure Leaning, 1972 Watercolor and graphite on paper from Berggruen Gallery |
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| Ryan Figure #9, 1982 Oil on canvas From Bergrgruen Gallery |
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| Untitled Figure, 2010 from the Stanford News |
