A visit to painter David Ligare’s Drapery series serves as an appetizer for exhibits to come.

This is your last chance to see David Ligare’s Drapery Paintings 1972-2023 at Winfield Gallery in Carmel. Consider it an appetizer.

Perhaps the most important living artist in Monterey County, Ligare, age 78, is everything one might feel the local art scene lacks. Looking for an antonym for provincial, I landed on universal – much better than cosmopolitan – as an adequate description of his classicism. Ligare is currently working on a large exhibit that will open in Bakersfield early next year, after which it will move to the Monterey Museum of Art.

Ligare first displayed his drapery paintings in New York in 1978. Since then, he has returned to the motif.

The paintings depict pieces of drapery thrown into the air as if by a ghost, always above a sea horizon. The drapery is ivory-white, waves run diagonally toward the viewer, the sun is setting, or maybe rising, and the sky is blue with violet and scarlet ribbons. The series’ main character is movement and the drapery’s sculptor is the wind.

The Drapery collection is one of several equally vital and impressive series’ in Ligare’s work. His seascapes are not always lonely; there, one can encounter Greek heroes and heroines, resting incognito at stone tables that, at other times, serve as altars of Ligare’s offerings to the gods of art. Important among them are Ligare’s depictions of bread, wine, lemons and pomegranates. He was the first artist to consciously try to artistically recreate the offerings found buried at Pompeii.

Now in the Carmel Valley stage of his life, Ligare arrived in the area in 1967 and spent six formative years in Big Sur, followed by many years in Salinas. But his lifelong study and admiration for classical Greece and Rome started long before that. He first traveled to Greece when he was 18; antiquity has followed him ever since.

“I consider California a Mediterranean country,” he says, his tone indicating the obviousness of this remark – with or without its Spanish heritage, the region is adorned with “trees evocative of the classical past,” as California biographer Kevin Starr described Monterey’s pines and cypresses.

DAVID LIGARE’s Drapery Paintings 1972-2023 on display through Saturday, July 8. The Winfield Gallery, Dolores between Ocean and 7th, Carmel. 624-3369, winfieldgallery.com