22 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY july 11-17, 2024 www.montereycountynow.com ant concept. Quoting from Kenneth Clark’s Civilization: “I believe order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology.” We are bombarded by political ideology but humanism is against all that. It’s for education and acceptance of diversity. And the heart of it is in Florence. One can go to the science museum there and see the Galileo telescope, the one he used. Then there’s the Duomo that Brunelleschi engineered. He and his friend, sculptor Donatello, went to Rome to study ruins. In their times, Rome went from 2 million people to 60,000 people, ruined in the medieval period, with houses falling down. They were reaching back over a thousand years, pulling out ancient ideas forward into the future. There are elements of Antiquity and Renaissance history that apply to us. There were aspects of ancient Greece and Rome that were not so pleasant— slavery, the life of women. At the same time, there were people who were thinking brilliant thoughts, positive things. You also draw from philosophy. You are inspired by both Plato and Aristotle, very different philosophers. They are so different. Plato is a deist seeking perfection, while Aristotle was investigating things, looking for the meaning and the essence. For Plato, it was the gods’ business. I would say he is more of a formalist. He didn’t care for mimetic/realistic art until his later years. He believed that art was a copy of a copy—a table is first an idea of god, then the reality. And a painting of a table is even a lesser thing. More oppositions: Apollonian and Dionysian. Where do you place yourself? Much more an Apollonian than Dionysian. On the other hand, [philosopher] Camille Paglia—she is a crazy person—wrote the book Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson where she explores the relation between decadence or chaos and art. Pompeii is a good example; the world of chaos right beneath our feet. We can be hit by a meteor at any time and share the fate of the dinosaurs. But my kind of chaos is that of a dilettante. It’s a gentlemanly chaos. No aggression. I’ve written some about this. I don’t do seascapes with grand crashing waves and all that. Mine is the medium sea, calm sea that expresses anticipation, waiting. Golden mean, middle measure is important to me. The measure in all and everything, I embrace all of it—proportion as measure and measured approach to something. Gentle way. My paintings are a threshold to another world, time and space. And the threshold is the medium space. If the alien art historians landed on the Earth at some point, could they tell that you worked in the 20th and 21st centuries? Yes, and the reason is photography. Because I have looked at photographs all my life. So I see this way. Especially color photography; it fixed my brain. And I use it in my artistic process. They could tell also because of the quality of light. Everything I create is in light: the landscapes, the figures, still lifes, natural sunlight. And here, Plato’s allegory of the cave comes to play. The idea that natural sun is more important than artificial light. Even when I have, let’s say, a candle in the altar [e.g. “Candles and Flowers,” 2017], the little flame is being cast as a shadow on the wall. So there’s natural sun. The sun is more preeminent, powerful sunlight is beautiful; it reflects everything. My painting of a candle in my altarlike space makes a very subtle comment on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, in which he presents the sun as truth. In my painting, the brightest light you see is the flame on the candle—but the sun, invisible to the right, is projecting a shadow of the flame on the left wall of the altar, meaning that the sun as truth and knowledge, is primary. Do you prefer Californian light or Italian light? First of all, it’s my light. There were times in Italy when I was very disappointed. I love late afternoon light but sometimes the Italian light would be so diffused by the moisture, the air. The clear light of California works; we have very little humidity here. When the sun is setting in Italy, but also many places in the U.S, the sun is just this magenta ball; it has no strength. But California afternoon light is strong. Greek light can be just as clear. I choose to have it really strong. I choose to not have it be diffused. There’s no night in your work. A good example is my painting “Achilles and the Body of Patroclus,” a very tragic scene that leads to all kinds of mess in the Iliad and because Achilles caused the death of his dearest friend. [Goddess] Hera is keeping the sun up so the Trojans and the Greeks can continue the battle. I chose the moment when dead Patroclus is being taken to the beach and Achilles is confronted with his body. Achilles goes wild. And then, the Iliad says, “And now ox-eyed Queen Hera told the tireless sun to return, though unwillingly, to the Ocean’s stream.” Late, low light is the one I love the most, the golden hour that also has the meaning of transition between day and night and life and death, in a sense. I use it in almost all of my paintings. It creates this classical balance. Light and shadow, Apollinian and Dionysian. Your harmony and beauty is out of this world. Except that I have chosen parts of the world to make these paintings from. They do exist in reality. For example, in my painting “In Praise of Italy,” there’s an actual rock I found between the Salinas Valley and the San Joaquin Valley, but the background is based on a landscape from Urbino, a hilltop view, used also, allegedly by Piero della Francesca for one of his paintings [“The Balconies” ]. So the Italian landscape, but also based on California. It’s what Robinson Jeffers often did, taking the landscape from this area and “The Tomb of Archimedes,” inspired by its description by Cicero. “My paintings are a threshold to another world, time and space.” “Rock Arch with Sun,” 2023, David Ligare
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