David Ligare
In 1974 he met his partner, Gary Smith, who accepted a position teaching art at Hartnell College in Salinas; they eventually settled in Corral de Tierra, the area of Monterey County that John Steinbeck called "The Pastures of Heaven.
[2][36] His creative process seeks a balance between structure (Apollonian order) and randomness of appearances (Dionysian chaos); together those elements convey his third area of focus: content rooted in narrative, allegory and timeless principles.
[2][38][5] Critics suggest that his unblemished subjects and surfaces (intended to erase his own presence) disguise deep-seated tensions in the work between introspection and pleasure, aesthetic distance and erotic interest, classicism and modernism.
[6][9][2] Ligare often sets his reworkings of traditional stories and morals within the rocky landscape, hills, trees and skies of his native Monterey region, melding the ancient Mediterranean with modern notions of California as an American Arcadia.
[2][9][8][5] Some writers have related Ligare's tactical adaptation of traditional realist genres to the more critically recognized photography of Jeff Wall—who also reworked historical pictorial traditions—and to the postmodernist paintings of Gerhard Richter and Chuck Close, despite clear differences among them.
[34] Los Angeles Times reviewer William Wilson called Ligare's first exhibition of this body of work (Koplin Gallery, 1983) one of the "most thought-provoking stylistic moves in recent memory" and deemed him "as sober as Poussin and as rigorous, in his way, as Jacques Louis-David.
"[29] Ligare's figurative narratives often featured handsome, athletic men in togas, arranged in carefully orchestrated poses and surrounded by dramatically sunlit, unspoiled nature, ruins or ancient architecture.
[44][7] He drew upon mythological sources such as Virgil's Aeneid and Homer's Iliad, while his strict compositional arrangements derived from Renaissance and neo-classical history paintings (e.g., Achilles and the Body of Patroclus (The Spoils of War), 1986); the work's theme—causing the inadvertent death of a lover—reflected the reality of that era's AIDS crisis.
[4][39][33][47] In 1988, Los Angeles Times critic Suvan Geer noted a shift in emphasis in some of Ligare's work, in which the Monterey County-Big Sur landscapes of John Steinbeck and Robinson Jeffers took center stage.
"[7] Like Ligare's figurative paintings, these were conceptual constructions—archetypes of a mythic Arcadia invented out of multiple photographic sources and highly ordered structures serving as metaphors for balance, the commensurability of parts and responsible social interaction.
[36][39][34] David Pagel identified a streak of Romanticism in this raking light, which gave "vivid physical form to those moments of silent stillness … when we get up before sunrise and feel the unspoiled potential of the breaking day.
[50][8] The altar-like "set" introduces a spiritual counterpart to the material, an idea manifest in his subjects—often food and drink items that recall depictions of offerings to the gods in ancient frescoes that serve as inspiration (e.g.
[51][50][8] Still Life with Grape Juice and Sandwiches (Xenia) (1994) conveyed themes of hospitality and social responsibility, depicting simple offerings common to the homeless shelter in Salinas at which Ligare volunteered for many years.
