“California classicist” painter David Ligare expands the genre with his unreal realism.
A copse of trees, grazing horses, verdant hills, distant mountains, shining sea. It’s a classic notion of landscape perfection. The particular scene portrayed in the painting Landscape with a Red Pony is the actual view from the house and studio of American contemporary realist David Ligare. “The location of the painted view is Corral de Tierra in Monterey County [California],” Ligare says. “It is the area that John Steinbeck called ‘the pastures of heaven’ in his book of the same name. The writings of Steinbeck and also the poet Robinson Jeffers were part of the inspiration for me to live and work in this beautiful place. It is a literate landscape.”
And Ligare is a literate painter. The exhibition David Ligare: California Classicist reveals an artist whose inspirations include everything from Steinbeck to Aristotle and whose imagination ranges far beyond the bucolic perfection of his home valley, in both location and subject. His varied canvases might run from neoclassical scenes of Tuscany to Hercules breaking up a fight between Pleasure and Virtue, from a still life of grape juice and sandwiches meticulously tablescaped and sensuously sunlit in front of the ocean to a light-drenched drapery tossed and suspended midair against an evocative seascape.
Rooted in both the contemporary and the ancient, Ligare gives free rein to the idea of time travel in his work, transporting the viewer to scenes that feel steeped in the ages and the eternal, in myth and realism, equally informed by his literal home ground in California and his intellectual home ground in Greco-Roman classicism.
His masterpiece might be Penelope. In luminous white raiment, she sits on a platform of stone tiles before an expanse of water and sky. All order and clarity, the painting is a revelation of the classical rule of thirds. It is also a time warp enigma: She is at once the wife of Odysseus, the picture of patience waiting beside the Ionian Sea for Homer’s epic hero to come home — and also the woman from Santa Barbara who so embodied the faithful Penelope in his mind that Ligare chose her for his model and painted her, goddesslike, in front of a Pacific horizon.
David Ligare: California Classicist, a retrospective of 80 works, is on view through January 17 at Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, California. The companion catalog by Scott A. Shields is available on Amazon.com. The artist is represented by Winfield Gallery in Carmel-by-the-Sea and Hirschl & Adler in New York.
