Letters: Ligare’s paintings overwhelm with beauty

Ligare’s paintings overwhelm with beauty

Many thanks to Claudia Meléndez Salinas for her fine article on artist David Ligare’s retrospective at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. Seen in person, Ligare’s paintings overwhelm the viewer with emotion and beauty. One just stares, not wanting to leave each work’s enchanted vision, as in “Landscape for Baucis and Philemon” and “Landscape with Red Pony” (early on, Ligare was taken by Steinbeck and Jeffers). Nearby, the artist draws upon history and myth, populating large canvasses with immortals and heroes such as “Achilles and the Body of Patroclus” and “Hercules Protecting the Balance Between Pleasure and Virtue.” Ligare has said he finds much of contemporary art to be “hopelessly conventional and academic” and that “shocking and transgressional have become cliches.” He champions “art that thinks” and the “literate picture.” The artist argues that “we are in need of a renewed desire for knowledge that our pop culture doesn’t deliver.”

David Ligare is that rare artist who offers an antidote to the postmodern malaise: the marriage of deep knowledge and transcendent beauty.

— David Clemens, Monterey

Jailing of Kentucky clerk a sign of lost freedom

Who, faithfully, carried out their office? The Declaration of Independence says, “that they (all men) are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” The Supreme Court can grant a civil right for a civil union, but they can’t grant the right to marry. That is granted by our Creator! That same document says, “Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Didn’t we vote about this issue with Proposition 8? I don’t hate gays, but to require an official to issue a marriage license for something that is not a marriage is nonsense! If the judges require a civil union ceremony, let them conduct it! With 40 percent of children being born out of wedlock, our country is rotting from within! Read The Herald with discernment and you will see that! And free that official who is in jail. We are all losing our freedoms!

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— Daniel Everett, Monterey

Politicians are the ones who got us into this mess

Peggy Norris wants Donald Trump, a self-made multibillionaire, to go back to his tower and make more money while leaving the business of governing to “someone who knows what he or she is doing.” Is she trying to tell us that the position that the United States is in is the result of people who know what they are doing? Oh, my gosh, now I’m really scared, I’m going to move out to the valley and drink some of the water out there, there’s just gotta be something in it …

— Richard O’Mara, Pacific Grove

Unfortunate placement of headline on Saturday

Just a coincidence or desire to jazz up the Herald? It doesn’t take too much imagination to read the headline on page 4 (Sept. 5, 2015) as “Man found guilty of kidnapping, raping girl.” How far will The Herald go to increase its readership?

I am eagerly waiting for the continuation of this story.

— Dennis Trason, Pacific Grove

New policy on fake flowers at El Carmelo Cemetery

I have been one of the main complainers regarding the trash those things leave behind when there is no follow up on the care or if they became trash for others to pick up. Kudos to those who went further than my bellowing, who followed through and went to the City Council meetings, gave witness how, yes, it has as we feared would happen, become very trashy looking, even with the efforts of Public Works and myself. And so I have heard, there is to be a new policy in the works, that after three weeks of laying down artificial flowers as memories, that they can be picked up and thrown out before the damp, and the wind and the animals get to them, so they don’t thoughtlessly become trashy litter to our sweet little cemetery.

I hear there is some good news regarding the El Carmelo Cemetery and the upcoming change in policy on artificial flowers. A while ago, the “no artificial flowers” policy was overturned due to a small, loud faction who felt leaving such mementos behind is what their loved ones would want.

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