The Pastoral Preserve - David Ligare

I came to Monterey County from Southern California over fifty years ago. I was a young man seeking the landscape described by the poet Robinson Jeffers and the novelist John Steinbeck. I found a cabin in Big Sur with a view of redwoods and the sea and proceeded to paint plein air landscapes imbued with the mythologies I had absorbed from reading those two writers. Their writings are soaked in history and hold the past trapped in a luxurious remoteness. Because of their use of history and mythology, and the maintained remoteness, for me, time seemed to stand still in much of Monterey County and it is that exact timelessness that most interests me.

 

I subsequently lived for many years in Corral de Tierra, a valley set between Monterey and Salinas, bounded by Laureles Grade and the looming Mount Toro. My house and studio overlooked oak-studded hills rolling out toward Monterey Bay, Santa Cruz and the open sea. John Steinbeck called Corral de Tierra the “pastures of heaven” in a book by that name. In that book, he was following a pattern established thousands of years ago in the Idylls by the Greek poet Theocritus.

 

Theocritus wrote about the lives and tribulations of shepherds and other rustics and, most importantly for me, the pastures they inhabit. These represent a median space between the wilderness and urban life, a region set apart from the ordinary, yet that midway point is a backdrop for all manner of human actions and endeavors. What has been called the “pastoral mode” has been applied to poetry, painting, landscape design, and even philosophy. It has been an important cornerstone in my thinking and work.

 

Although I have lived nearby for a very long time, I first visited the Santa Lucia Preserve only a few years ago and was immediately struck by the quiet, yet intense beauty of the landscape. Looking across the hills with their forms described by a low sun, the long shadows suggest another aspect of the pastoral mode — the median period between day and night. The late sunlight represents what is sometimes called “the golden hour.” It creates a mood of reverent beauty tinged with the gentle melancholy of the passing of another day. The Italian poet Jacopo Sannazaro described it as “the mortal serene of an evening.”

 

There are many artists, from ancient times to the present, who have been important to me, but, in terms of pastoralism, I look in particular to the paintings of the French-Italian artist Claude Lorrain, who, in the 17th century, was the first to paint landscapes that included the setting sun. His evocations of evening, often with shepherds, epitomize the pastoral language of light and the deepest, most human awareness — the beauty (and brevity) of life itself.

 

Those who inhabit the Santa Lucia Preserve experience the intense natural beauty of nature as nature has intended — “unimproved” by urban life. The beauty of the setting provides the possibility for a rich renewal of spirit and a deepened love and respect for the land itself.

 

David Ligare grew up in Southern California and attended Art Center College of Design. Inspired by the writings of Robinson Jeffers and John Steinbeck the artist moved to Monterey County at the age of twenty-three. Since that time Ligare has had nearly fifty solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, London, Rome and elsewhere. In 2015 the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento mounted a retrospective of his work entitled “David Ligare: California Classicist," featuring landscapes, figures and still lifes from Ligare’s long career.

 

In addition, the artist has been published in hundreds of books, magazines and catalogs and has work in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT, The DeYoung Museum in San Francisco and many more institutions. He has taught for The University of Notre Dame Rome Studies Program, The Prince of Wales Institute of Architecture in London, The University of California Santa Barbara and Hartnell College.