20 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY july 11-17, 2024 www.montereycountynow.com on altars and as part of a tomb. They correspond beautifully with a round, sphere-like window up on the wall, right below the ceiling, sending natural sunlight from above. The sphere has no beginning and no end, has no edges or vertices, the center is everywhere. “You can’t add anything to or take away,” Ligare says. The exhibit also shows the artist’s spheres of influence, thinkers and concepts from ancient art to the Renaissance and up to the 19th century. Even in referencing work that holds a recognizable, even iconic place, Ligare is doing something different. “He remains very stubbornly out of the mainstream,” says David Rodes, a retired UCLA professor of drama, Renaissance and early modern studies about Ligare. “His work is full of symbols and meanings. It has unusual grace and harmony. It’s precise and very serious.” After the white sphere of 1997, Ligare picked up the sphere again in 2002, when he created “Still Life with Polykleitan Head (Summa),” which can be seen in the current exhibit. In 2014, Ligare made a drawing of a rock formation containing a shrine set in a quiet sea and sheltered by an Italian pine. A year later he created “Still Life with Gold Sphere,” followed by “White Sphere (To the Encircling Seas)” in 2015. In 2020, the Monterey Museum of Art purchased Ligare’s 2014 work “Magna Fide” (The Great Belief), which is the central painting in the Spheres of Influence exhibition. It shows a shrine consisting of a base with a fire and a stone sphere. The idea was to honor the Florentine artist and sphere-lover Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), further influenced by Arnold Bocklin’s “Isle of the Dead,” the ultimate 19th-century enigmatic work painted in Florence in 1880. In 2022, Ligare painted an homage to mathematician and physicist Archimedes (c. 287-212 BCE), whose tomb reportedly consisted of a sphere, a cylinder and a square. This work, “The Tomb of Archimedes,” also can be currently admired in the Monterey Museum of Art. In Ligare’s art world, everything is illuminated by clear, natural sunlight. Late afternoon light is his favorite; he chooses it for most of his paintings. No wonder his studio also has a natural but magical light. It’s where he works on the upcoming solo exhibition David Ligare: A Specific View that will be featured at Hirschl & Adler Galleries in New York, starting Sept. 5. His studio, located in an unassuming building at the mouth of Carmel Valley, surprises with its size, perhaps enlarged by sunlight or the outsized spirit of the artist. There, among shelves of books (well and often used, based on a disheveled look, but seemingly still organized), sits David Ligare, working on his renewed classicism. He spends hours reading and working on his pieces. His “Penelope” hangs on the main wall, placed almost as if above an altar. Weekly: Let’s start with the sphere. Ligare: Years ago [1997], I made a large painting called “The White Sphere,’’ with a description: Verum Philosophiae, which means “true philosophy” in Latin. It seemed to me that the sphere represents the ideal. Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti, and many others, thought that the sphere is the perfect form. It’s the most ubiquitous form in the universe. The planets, the sun; there’s an unbelievable number of this form. So yes, the sphere is the main theme in the current exhibit. A human head is a sphere too. To a degree. Yes. I never thought about it, but yes. In fact, one of my paintings from the exhibit is “Tomb Of Archimedes” which shows a tomb but is also a portrait, where the sphere is the Archemides’ head. I got the idea from Cicero, who was a pretty smart guy. What was your first experience with Greece and Italy? When I was out of high school, my parents allowed me to travel to Europe with a school friend who had grandparents in Paris. I don’t know what they were thinking, but they loaned us a car. We drove around Spain, Italy, Switzerland and France. Later, during the same trip, I went to Greece, by myself. I arrived in Athens at night, by train. But I opened the front door the next day and it was hot. I saw the Parthenon in the sunshine up on the hill. It stayed with me, this beautiful moment. I found some consciousness that was still waiting to come out. I walked up into the Acropolis and remember sitting with my back against one of the walls of the Parthenon, reading The King Must Die by Mary Renault. I realized that I was living in the story. It was happening all around me. I’ve returned many times to Greece and Italy since then. Florence, especially. Florence for me is a thinking place. The meaning of Florence is the essence of humanism, a really importAbove: David Ligare is a big reader, and not only of books on art. His interest spans from ancient writers such a Vergil and Cicero to relatively new books, such as At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others by Sarah Bakewell. Below: Ligare at work in his studio. His paintings are often monumental, almost always horizontal and filled with natural light. Daniel Dreifuss Daniel Dreifuss
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