There is a pattern developing in the career of realist painter David Ligare. He’s had solo shows at Plus One Gallery in London, Koplin Del Rio Gallery in Los Angeles, and then Hartnell College Gallery in Salinas. He’s in public collections in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Dept. of Drawings & Prints of The Uffizi in Florence, Italy, and the Monterey Museum of Art. In the course of an illustrious 40 years in painting, he returns back home to Monterey County.
The Monterey Museum of Art is showing his work again in its Monterey NOW series, which spotlights significant local living artists, in a show opening 6-8pm Wednesday called River/Mountain/Sea, comprising three large landscape paintings and five studies.
“Three paintings,” Ligare says, “like an installation rather than an exhibition, a chapel to the landscape. I’m not religious, but I see nature as a kind of religion.”
They are meticulously realized, almost photorealistic, neo-classical works of the landscape of his beloved home county, which has served as the backdrop to previous mythological paintings. Here, the background moves into the foreground.
“The two people so instrumental in making me move up here were Jeffers and Steinbeck,” he says. “Both of those writers, when dealing with landscape, mythologized and deepened the landscape with their understanding of history and literature. These paintings [at MMA] imply many things, larger circumstances.”
There are three of them, in homage to tripartite systems of thought: the heaven, earth and man of Taoism; Aristotle’s beginning, middle and end; Hegel’s thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Each landscape is built out on the geometric compositions of triangles that point skyward, heavenward, in reverence.
“My world is absolutely wrapped up in all kinds of arcane sorts of things like that,” Ligare says.
For instance, he has a small painting in the annual Miniatures fundraiser show, which opens the same time as Ligare’s show and contains 300-plus donated paintings from member artists. It’s of a pine cone, on pine wood, in reference to god of wine Dionysus, who Ligare says sported a pine cone on top of his staff. See? Patterns of meaning everywhere.
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