William L. Oakes, Educator And Noted Illustrator, 61
DGH
In the 1970s, when cameras were not allowed, William L. Oakes was one
of the handful of artists accredited to work in the courtroom during
the Watergate trials. One of his sketches, of some of the indicted,
appeared on the front page of The Washington [DC] Post.
In the Navy during the Vietnam War, he was assigned to draw battleships
that sailed into the harbor, their crews, the divers, and patients on
hospital ships, painting mostly in watercolors. The hundreds that he
did are housed in The Navy Art Collection in Washington DC.
Mr. Oakes, who shared his passion for art and creative thinking with
countless children and adults as a teacher, died of a heart attack Oct.
2 at Exeter Hospital in Exeter, New Hampshire. He was 61 and lived in
Hampton, New Hampshire.
"Passionate would be the word to describe Bill," said Nina Greenwald,
acting director of the graduate program of Critical and Creative
Thinking at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, where Mr. Oakes
studied and taught. "He captivated students by making them feel they
had untapped talents. Bill exuded magical qualities.
"He was a big guy with a big heart with the biggest imagination I have
ever met. His art was alive with color and magic and dynamism, just the
way he was. He would walk into a room, and the place would light up."
In addition to the Watergate trials and his Navy collection, Mr.
Oakes's work has appeared in such magazines as Time, National
Geographic, Reader's Digest, and Yankee, on record album covers,
television networks, and in a children's book nurturing creativity that
he and others authored. He has been listed in Who's Who in Art in
America since 1980.
One of his proudest moments, according to his wife, Sharon, came soon
after Watergate when an art class he started for city children in
Washington, DC, swept an art competition for awards in a citywide
competition. As a result, the students and he appeared on network
television, and their work was exhibited at the Corcoran Art Museum in
Washington. ''That's when Bill got into nurturing creativity in
children," she said.
Perhaps, she said, it was the memory of something that happened to him
as a child that compelled him to encourage creativity in children.
"Bill was in the fourth grade, and the teacher was talking about
Magellan," she said. "When she found him drawing a picture of a ship
the explorer might have sailed on his voyage around the world, she tore
it up and told him 'never to waste paper like that in my class again.'
Bill never drew again at school or at home until he was in the 12th
grade."
A tall, handsome man, Mr. Oakes even looked like an artist in his beret
and beard, she said. "He saw beauty everywhere."
He was born in Richmond, Virginia, to Robert and Maggie (Craven) Oakes.
His father, a Navy man, was stationed in Brunswick, Maine, and that's
where Mr. Oakes went to school. After high school, he enrolled at the
Cornish School of Applied Arts in Seattle. He left before his fourth
year to join the Navy and was based in Washington.
After three years in the Navy, Mr. Oakes worked as an illustrator. He
did illustrations, his wife said, for "almost the complete works of
Shakespeare" for the Franklin Library in Franklin Center, Pennsylvania,
mostly pen-and-ink drawings with a color wash. He also illustrated
William Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury" for the library. In 1978,
he did the album cover for Andre Previn conducting Rachmaninoff with
the London Symphony.
Mr. Oakes moved to Boston in the early 1980s to work for the Christian
Science Monitor for a year. (For 15 years, Mr. Oakes was a Christian
Science chaplain at two Massachusetts correctional facilities. He also
taught Sunday school for 30 years). Because Mr. Oakes was "so
phenomenally imaginative," Greenwald said, he was accepted into the
Critical and Creative Thinking master's degree program at UMass without
a completed bachelor's degree.
Afterward, Mr. Oakes taught in the program and conducted workshops in
creative thinking around the state. He also taught at the New England
School of Art and Design and at The Art Institute in Boston,
Massachusetts.
Mr. Oakes and the former Sharon Kelly were married in 1990. That year,
he traveled to Mexico and became "so excited with its colors and
textures," she said, that he focused on abstract art on his return. In
1999 in Hampton, Mr. Oakes had an exhibit of abstract art that could
both be seen and heard; viewers wore a set of wireless headphones.
"Stare long enough at some of these pieces, and things almost begin to
move," the Globe said. It quoted Mr. Oakes as saying, ''I'm encouraging
everybody to see in new ways." Boston's Museum of Science later
featured the exhibit.
Recently, his wife said, Mr. Oakes had an idea for a "team" park,
instead of a theme park, where people would become involved in
activities "to stretch the imagination."
Besides his wife, Mr. Oakes leaves a son, Wendall, and a daughter, Dawn
Oakes Patten, both of Kingston, New Hampshire; a sister, Margie Mason
of Mt. Pleasant, Iowa; and a grandson.
Boston Globe