William L. Oakes, 61; was educator, noted illustrator
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
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, D.C.
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, N.H. He was 61 and lived in Hampton, N.H.
''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, D.C., 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, Va., 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, Pa., 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.
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, N.H.; a sister, Margie Mason of Mt. Pleasant, Iowa; and a grandson.
A celebration of Mr. Oakes's life will be held at Phillips Exeter Academy's Phillips Church in Exeter at 2 p.m. Oct. 22. Greenwald said an exhibit of Mr. Oakes's work will be held at UMass at a later date.
