Nathan Oliveira was born in Oakland, California to parents of Portuguese descent. As a youth he was interested in art and music, and considered the possibility of becoming a coronetist in a jazz band. However, during his high school years he visited the California Palace of the Legion of Honor where he saw a Rembrandt painting that profoundly influenced the course of his life. For a time he attempted to study advertising art before enrolling in the California College of Arts and Crafts* in Oakland with the intention of pursuing a career as a portrait painter.

During the course of his college studies he began to move from portraits to a more expressionistic and non specific figuration. Despite the shift to a more ab...