Internationally acclaimed artist and former Stanford professor Nathan Oliveira died Nov. 13 at his home in Stanford from complications with pulmonary fibrosis and diabetes.

At 81, Oliveira "was a painter of extreme talent and ingenuity, right to the end of his life," said Peter Selz, the renowned art historian and author who curated an Oliveira retrospective in 2002.

He painted wings as a metaphor for the soaring of one's mind, but over time, the wingshape itself vanished while his art became known the world over.

Known for his frequent hikes up to The Dish and his interest in wildlife, Oliveira created his famous Windhover, a series of paintings on predatory birds, in the 1970s after a graduate teaching assistant gave him a stuffed kestrel.

"I have always related to this predatory bird, but mostly through ancient art," he said in an interview for Cantor Arts Center in 1995. Out of the 75 works that he painted or drew for the series, some were done on canvasses 17 feet across.

Oliveira believed that, "If you persist and you believe in it, your world opens up to you," as he said in an interview with The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. "And sometimes that takes an entire lifetime."

Oliveira accomplished enough for many lifetimes. According to Selz, he revived printmaking, which had gone into decline in the 1960s and 1970s. He sculpted, painted and taught, and in the late 1950s helped lead the Bay Area Figurative Movement, which refused to give in to the dominant trend of abstraction.

"I'm not part of the avant-garde," Oliveira told Stanford Magazine in 2002, "I'm part of the garde that comes afterwards, assimilates, consolidates, refines."

Oliveira joined the Stanford faculty in 1964 after doing artist-in-residencies at Harvard, the University of California-Los Angeles, Cornell, Notre Dame, the University of Illinois and other institutions.

When Stanford's art department allowed Oliveira to use its new studio in the hills of Stanford in 1988, he found the means to work on several large canvases at once. Here, he continued his works illustrating wingshape, often reflecting the curvature of the planet.

Oliveira has held exhibitions in New York, London, Melbourne, Paris and Stockholm. San Francisco MOMA alone owns more than 30 examples of his work.

Born on Dec. 19, 1928, in Oakland, Oliveira was the child of poor Portuguese immigrants and struggled with dyslexia in school. Upon encountering Rembrant's 1632 Joris de Caulerii while visiting the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco as a young adult, Oliveira decided that he would paint people, too.

After earning his bachelor's and then master's degrees in fine arts, Oliviera married Ramona Christensen in 1951 and got his first teaching job at San Francisco's Art Institute for $2.50 an hour.

"When Mona and I got married and had children, we weren't making very much money," he said in the 2002 interview with Stanford Magazine. "After we'd get the bills paid, I'd say to her, 'Well, how many tubes of paint can I get this week—one of red, or two of yellow?'"

Oliveira described his artwork using the Portuguese word saudade, meaning  a feeling of yearning and nostalgia.

"Success in what I do is measured by surviving into one's mature years and continuing to find enough genuine reasons to work," said Oliveira, who retired in 1995 and continued to paint until his death, when he left 30 paintings in progress.

"The outpouring was remarkable, since Nathan was suffering from pulmonary fibrosis and was tethered to an oxygen tank," said John Seed, a professor of art and art history at Mt. San Jacinto College in Southern California.

Seed described his former Stanford mentor as "an exceptionally fine painter and an empathetic teacher. In his own art, and in the art that he admired, he was involved in the search for something that transcended time."

For Oliveira, his wingshaped paintings of the Windhover collection are that transcendance, which allows him to live on through his art.

"Whatever will happen," Oliveira said during his interview with SF MOMA, "I will not force and try to control it. It will simply happen by itself."

Oliviera is survived by his sister, Marcia Heath of Milbrae; his three children, Lisa Lamoure of Fresno, Gina Oliveira of Kihea, Maui, and Joe Oliveira of Palo Alto; and five grandchildren. His wife, Ramona, died of cancer in 2006.

His memorial will take place on Jan. 12, 2011, at Stanford Memorial Church.