David Ligare -Still Life With a Basket of Grapes & a Fig -Oil Painting

Details

Description

David Ligare -Still Life with a Basket of Grapes & a Fig -Oil painting
Oil painting on Canvas - Signed … Read more David Ligare -Still Life with a Basket of Grapes & a Fig -Oil painting
Oil painting on Canvas - Signed & Dated 2005 -
Canvas size - 20x24- Fram size 22x26"

Artist Biography
David H. Ligare (Born 1945) is active/lives in California. He is known for Mod arcadian-landscape, still life and figure painter.
Known for his sublime landscapes of an area called Pastures of Heaven west of Salinas, California, David Ligare paints the views he sees from his studio window. Frequently he has a precise still life in the foreground, and usually his lighting suggests late afternoon when the shadows are lengthening.
Other subjects are figures, architecture, and religious themes, and some of his paintings seem surrealistic in that they have incongruous juxtapositions such as figures from classical mythology in a modern-day setting. Ligare is a frequent visitor to Italy, especially Tuscany, where he finds much inspiration for his work.He was raised in Los Angeles and studied at the Art Center College of Design. He dates his interest in classical themes to a visit he made to Greece when he was eighteen years old and arrived in Athens one night by train. He awoke the next morning to see the Acropolis bathed in sunlight, which for him, was a defining moment.In the beginning of his career, he painted plein-air landscapes, and about ten years later began inserting classical figures and architecture into his pictures. He evolved into a studio painter, and his goal is ideal proportion and perfect symmetry of composition, something he accomplishes by dividing his canvas into grids.A highlight of his career was a one-man exhibition in 1998 at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. In the catalogue of that show, Ligare wrote of the trends he saw in contemporary art: "Instead of being inflexibly attached to the present, art will be free to wander through all of history, taking inspiration from the greatest thoughts and works" ("Southwest Art," 9/2000).
For over forty years, David Ligare has been making paintings that conceptually link ancient Greek philosophy to contemporary social needs. Through established painting tropes like the figure and the landscape, Ligare has been embedding tenets of Plato and Aristotle within deftly painted scenes allegorizing social issues such as literacy and homelessness. With Still Life, the artist continues his thesis by giving new meaning and a new history to that eponymous genre.Central to the paintings in Still Life is the late afternoon sunlight, whose clarity essentializes the objects on display to create moments of profound stillness. Consider the calm of Still Life with Figs, Pomegranate, and Rose, in which every object falls into place as if they only exist, or will ever exist, in that exact location. That ease of ontology is supported by a major theme of Ligare’s work, balance. Outside of the philosophical meaning of the word, a balanced composition is also the artist’s true aim. This is evident in works like Still Life with Lemons and Pot where Ligare slyly lifts the tablecloth to avoid the composition from toppling over, or in Still Life with Apricots, Wheat and Poppies (Offering) with wheat and flowers precariously balanced on the basket of fruit. As stillness and balance give each object its reason to be, it is that late-day sun which bathes everything in a unifying light. Each flower, fruit and pot take center stage in brilliant half-light while their long shadows merge; a visual metaphor for the interconnectedness of all things. The artist writes, “Light, most particularly sunlight, has occupied my eye, mind, and hand throughout my entire career. There is an essential truth to sunlight, perhaps the central truth.”The choice of still life as subject matter is hardly trivial. No genre is perhaps better suited for Ligare’s use of allegory and symbolism. Deceptively simple, these paintings are laden with meaning and reference. Each is a push in the artist’s lifelong call for a renewed passion for knowledge, a message which feels timelier each day. In the complex world we presently find ourselves, advocacy for Stillness, Balance and Truth represents a clear way forward. See less