When visiting the Crocker Art museum yesterday I looked around for awhile looking for a reasonable piece before stumbling upon an eye catching oil painting by David Ligare titled, Landscape of a Running Horse. David was born 1945, in Oak Park Illinois.
The first glance of this painting appeared to be realistic and reminded me of Rosa Bonheur's painting of The Horse Fair. Reading a short bio about David Ligare on one of the gallery walls it mentioned that he was not realistic painter but rather an post modern classicist idealist that borrowed from the ancient Greek philosophers during the neoclassical period. His highly rendered painting definitely reflect the art style from this era but it has a modern flare by including in the landscape
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The highlights captured on the horse's body are to near perfection along with that the painstakingly detailed work in the surface of small lake in the middle ground. Alluding back to Rosa
Bonheur, her paintings of animals and their majestic movements took months to master. Ligare must of drawn livestock numerous times in order to maintain those proportions when painting the white horse depicted in Figure 2. It makes the viewer appreciate the effort that was put into this piece.
David Ligare is paying homage to the Greek architecture style with stone buildings, one being to the right of the painting at the two other structures located in the far distance giving us a sense of depth in the painting. This sense of depth is in vertical with the motion of the rider's horse launching forward into space. Viewers can see that Vercellio shows movement in Figure 1 in a similar fashion.
David Ligare however seems to lower the fear level of the white horse in Figure 2 and almost looks as if were playing.
It can be easy to say that Ligare is a photo-realist rather than an artist who tries to follow the ideals from the classical past but calling him a photo-realist would be a disservice. It is clearly seen