Steinbeck and his Country Inspire Contemporary Artists
As seen in the works of Warren Chang and David Ligare
Story by David Laws. All paintings are reproduced by permission.
The landscape of Monterey County has inspired painters and writers since Jules Tavernier established his Bohemian art colony in 1875, and Robert Louis Stevenson penned his essay on “The Old Pacific Capital” just four years later.
Writer John Steinbeck used scenes and settings of what is now known as Steinbeck Country to illustrate how the land and its features shaped the lives and fortunes of his characters. Many of the finest works of early California Impressionist painters, including E. Charlton Fortune and Armin Hansen, also used the land and seascapes of the region to illuminate the narrative story of their works. Steinbeck met Fortune, was carried home by Hansen after a heavy night’s drinking, was painted by, and befriended and encouraged others, including Bruce Ariss, Judith Deim, James Fitzgerald, and Ellwood Graham. His influence and the landscape of Steinbeck Country continue to resonate with artists today.
David Ligare and Warren Chang, two of the most highly regarded contemporary local artists, acknowledge Steinbeck as a common source of inspiration. Chang and Ligare create realist images strongly influenced by classical periods and artists. Chang’s work owes much to the styles of great masters such as Millet, Rembrandt, and Vermeer. Ligare combines rules of structure that he attributes to the 17th-century French painter Nicolas Poussin and his deep knowledge of Greco-Roman art and literature. While both men described their work as narrative art, paintings that tell a story, their approaches are distinctively different.
Chang, like Steinbeck, delves into the human condition. His paintings of field workers, often depicting marginalized members of society, are a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. Ligare’s landscapes of Steinbeck Country are typically devoid of human artifacts and rely on lighting and composition to evoke tension and complexity. In his masterfully crafted prose, Steinbeck achieves similar effects in his extended introduction to the Salinas Valley in East of Eden. He fills the entire first chapter with descriptions of the topography, people, history, plants, animals, and communities of the Salinas Valley to create a compelling introduction to the web of conflicting forces that underlie the novel.
Warren Chang — “Stories on Canvas”
Born in 1957 and raised in Monterey, California, Warren Chang graduated with a BFA in illustration from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 1981. After two decades as an award-winning illustrator in California and New York, he returned to Monterey and transitioned to a career as a fine artist. Chang has earned many awards, and his work has been featured in numerous publications. He is among only 50 artists to be inducted as a Master Signature member of the Oil Painters of America.
Chang’s fine art portfolio embraces both interior and landscape subjects. The interiors include portraits, still-lifes, and scenes from his home, studio, and the classrooms where he teaches at the San Francisco Academy of Art University. Most of his landscapes portray the scenery of Monterey and adjacent Santa Cruz County. A common element across all of his work is the narrative content, a sense that the image captures a single moment in an ongoing story.
Chang is best known for his paintings of field workers, a theme that harkens back to memories of automobile drives with his parents through the agricultural fields of Steinbeck Country. His youthful imagination conjured dramatic scenes from the writer’s stories onto the passing landscape. His modern renderings of workers stooping to till the soil and harvest vegetables have been likened to the paintings of Flemish Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder. As Chang does not adopt the latter’s practice of dressing like a peasant in order to mingle with his subjects, his sketching forays into the fields are not always welcomed. “Approaching Storm” is a dramatic study of workers in the Salinas Valley hurrying to complete the broccoli harvest before a storm arrives that could destroy the crop and devastate their livelihoods
“Days End” portrays workers leaving artichoke fields near Castroville at the end of the day. Mood and emotion are conveyed through deep shadows and late afternoon lighting rendered in subdued colors.
“Fall Tilling” won best of show in the Ray Mar Fine Art Competition of October 2013. But for the cell phone and a can of Coke in the hands of the seated female worker, this image portrays a scene that could have been painted at any time in the past 200 years.
When asked, “What’s the story behind the cell phone?” Chang advises that “No one interpretation is necessarily more accurate than another. You have the freedom to take from each painting what you will,” a comment that echoes Steinbeck’s responses to similar inquiries about the meaning of his work.
David Ligare — “Paintings from the Pastures of Heaven”
David Ligare was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1945. He received his formal training at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles and, “inspired by the writings of John Steinbeck and Robinson Jeffers,” he moved to Monterey County in his early twenties. He lived and worked in a small house on the Big Sur coastline where he experimented “as young artists do, with new styles and concepts.” His experiments led to a distinctive personal style he describes as “Post-Modern, Neo-Classical American” that weaves modern retelling of Greek mythology into landscapes that are instantly familiar to residents of Steinbeck Country. His paintings have appeared in numerous solo exhibitions and are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi, Florence, and Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum of Art, Madrid.
In “John Steinbeck and the Pastoral Landscape: An Artist’s Viewpoint,” a lecture at the National Steinbeck Center, Salinas, in 2002, Ligare said, “I have basically made a career of pulling the past into the present.” His “Landscape with a Man Drinking from a Spring” is set in the Gabilan Mountains, the range to the east of Steinbeck’s setting of The Red Pony. His depiction of “a celebration of a wholesomeness that embraces both life and death,” a theme inspired by Greco-Roman culture, shares two ancient symbols with Steinbeck’s description of Jody drinking from a mossy tub on the Tiflin Ranch. In both works, a spring represents life, while a cypress tree, beneath which Carl Tiflin slaughtered pigs, is the symbol of death.
Ligare prefers to paint in the “golden hour” of the late afternoon because “No matter whether I’m painting a simple rock or a figure in a landscape or a still life, it’s important to me to use the late afternoon sunlight and to create a sense of wholeness by recognizing all of the direct and indirect light sources. Everything in nature is a reflection in one way or another of everything around it.”
After Ligare moved from the coast to the inland Corral de Tierra Valley, the setting for Steinbeck’s The Pastures of Heaven, the California landscape emerged from the background of his still-life paintings to become the dominant subject of the canvas. David Ligare, a booklet and essay on his work published by the Hackett-Freedman Gallery in 1999, contains nine plates. Six of them are based on panoramic views of scenes from the valley that could serve as illustrations for the writer’s book. The cover illustration “Landscape with a Red Pony” (see top of this page) also invokes Steinbeck’s story of adolescent initiation.
“River” is one of three large (60” x 90”) works created in homage to Monterey County. Together with “Mountain” and “Sea,” they represent iconic landmarks featured in Steinbeck’s California stories. The river scene shows the Salinas River as it emerges from the confines of the valley into the broad coastal plain at Monterey Bay.
“Mountain” shows Mount Toro and the crags of Castle Rock overlooking the Pastures of Heaven as evening shadows fill the folds on its western flank. In “Sea,” granite tidal rocks are lit by the last rays of the golden glow of evening over Monterey Bay near Lovers Point in Pacific Grove.
Credits and Gallery Representation
The paintings by Warren Chang reproduced above are copyright works of the artist and are used with permission. These and many others appear in the book Warren Chang Narrative Paintings, published by Flesk Publications (2012).
His original paintings can be viewed at the Winfield Gallery, Carmel, CA Hauk Fine Arts, Pacific Grove, CA and American Legacy Fine Arts, Pasadena, CA. For more information, visit the artist’s website at: www.warrenchang.com
The paintings by David Ligare reproduced above are copyright works of the artist and are used with permission. The exhibit David Ligare: Spheres of Influence at the Monterey Museum of Art (May 16 — September 1, 2024) showcases the artist’s exploration of classicism, revealing an eternal phenomenon that marries intellectual pursuits with the transcendent beauty of nature in radiant light.
His original paintings can be viewed at Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York, NY, and the Winfield Gallery, Carmel, CA. For more information, visit the artist’s website at: www.davidligare.com
This story is adapted and updated from “John Steinbeck Inspires Monterey County Visual Arts Masters, Past and Present,” published by steinbecknow.com, a noncommercial media portal focusing on issues inspired by the works of John Steinbeck, on December 20, 2013.
