Biography

David Ligare’s work embodies the triumphant return of the classical sensibility to contemporary art. His work demonstrates that a landscape inspired by Nicolas Poussin, who was in turn influenced by the Greeks and Romans, can be relevant to 21st-century eyes. Ligare integrates principles of clarity, proportion, and significance in his canvases, and brings an equal measure of rigor to his landscapes, nudes, and still lifes. Impeccably crafted and painted in a finely detailed manner, his works presents narratives that stretch far beyond the here and now and into more profound philosophical realm.

Ligare was born in Oak Park, Illinois, and moved to Los Angeles at age five. He studied at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where, despite the prevailing influences of pop art and abstract expressionism, he began making watercolors and oil paintings outdoors. Ligare was drafted into the army where he worked as an illustrator. While still in the army, he began exhibiting in New York galleries. Ligare has lived in Monterey County since the late 1960s, and in the early 1990s made his home in the hills near Salinas, a community located in California’s Central Coast and best known as the home of writer John Steinbeck. The landscape of this region—its hills and trees, rock formations, and clear, arid skies—is often reflected in his work.

The horse and rider, representing nature and culture, was a familiar theme in ancient art as in many subsequent periods, and has long been a subject of interest for Ligare. As early as 1980 he began making studies for a painting that would one day evolve into Areta (Black Figure on a White Horse). He was initially inspired by Greek black figure vase paintings dating from the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. His image of a black man riding a white horse has a sculptural solidity and provides many opportunities for the artist to explore light while illuminating the model’s supple limbs, the horse’s graceful neck, and the surrounding seascape. In Ligare’s work, however, even physical beauty has a purpose, an underlying meaning. The title Areta is an archaic form of the Greek word “arete” that means “the innate excellence of noble natures.” The inscription at the bottom of Ligare’s painting derives from the ancient poet Pindar’s Olympian Odes and reads, “But for all things there is a measure set: To know the due time, therein lies true skill.” Ligare believes that although the text was written in praise of an athlete, it could also apply to the art of a poet, or indeed to many other endeavors requiring timing and skill. He expands the intent of his work to include cultural diversity, selecting an African-American model and thereby symbolically integrating history. In 1991 he wrote that Greek “Classicism was an amalgam of styles and ideas from the earliest and smokiest of times. It absorbed something from all of the cultures it came into contact with, from Egypt and Africa to Asia, creating in the process an enormously inclusive rather than exclusive ideal.”1

A similar largeness and seriousness of purpose defines David Ligare’s work as an artist. With an unwavering sense of the discipline required to make meaningful paintings, he takes on enormous artistic challenges and succeeds in creating a vision of an idealized past. His paintings recall classical pastoral subjects well known to artists from the past, while serving a moralistic purpose, suggesting that the ancients had insights still relevant to a contemporary audience. The incandescent hues of his paintings are matched by his desire to express the most radiant aspects of human nature, which he does with grace. —J.N.

1. David Ligare, “Involving Architecture: Painting and Architectural Principles,” Dialogo, the Journal of the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture (1991): 9–13.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)

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