Biography

Jonathan Briggs was born in Yorkshire in 1956 and has been practising as a full-time painter for some twenty years, following a period spent in the archaeology department of a national museum. He has been represented by Francis Kyle Gallery since 1985 and participated first in the Gallery's Ridgeway exhibition, shown also at the Museum and Art Gallery, Swindon and The Mount House Gallery, Marlborough. Much of Briggs' work from the Ridgeway project is reproduced in 'The Ridgeway: Europe's Oldest Road' (Phaidon Press, Oxford 1988). In 1995 he showed in Per una selva oscura: Artists take to the Forest.

In the early 1990s Briggs discovered the coastal landscape of Dorset, which proved a fertile vehicle for his explorations of cloud structure and the nucleus of his first one-man exhibition with Francis Kyle Gallery in 1993. In 1994 he exhibited at the Schloss Landestrost, Hanover, when his work was purchased by the State Government of Lower Saxony. Second and third one-man exhibitions with Francis Kyle Gallery followed in 2001 and 2003, when he showed work mainly from Devon, Sussex, Somerset and East Anglia, developing his distinctive vision of harmonious landscape. In 2003 Briggs participated in the Gallery's theme exhibition Roma, contributing a sequence of paintings from the Alban hills, in 2005 he took part in Lair of The Leopard: twenty artists go in search of Lampedusa's Sicily and in 2006 he took part in Everyone Sang: a View of Siegfried Sassoon and His World by twenty-five painters today. Fourth one-man exhibition 2005.

Jonathan Briggs

The Yorkshire painter Jonathan Briggs paints some of his most cherished locations: Somerset's Quantock hills (Dorothy Wordsworth's 'loneliest place') and the border country between Kent and Sussex where rolling uplands giving on to a broad coastline furnish him with characteristic subjects.

In the Kentish downland Briggs finds opportunities to absorb 'the emotional resonances of space, distance and skyscape,' sometimes experienced 'in the strange magic of gathering twilight', suggested by an unusually dark foreground in some compositions. In the flat expanse of Romney Marsh and around the old Cinque Ports of Rye and Winchelsea, he savoured a 'particular, desolate, melancholy beauty.' In such places, the visual world seems 'broken down into its starkest, most basic elements of land, sea and sky,' intimating the presence still of an almost primordial past.

To fuse inner and outer worlds has long been the principle objective on Jonathan Briggs' agenda as a landscapist. 'The exercise of precise, even cool observation, interacting with the looser, more instinctive processes of dream, memory and imagination, this is my territory. In some respects almost forensic (so at least it seems to me), my paintings are still about finding correlatives for inner states and feelings.' Uncomfortable in a man-made environment, responding more readily to 'that heady mix of mystery and calm, grandeur and a sense of otherness,' Jonathan Briggs is perhaps most at one with the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, for whom the task of painting is 'not the accurate portrayal of air, water and trees but the soul… that is reflected in them.'

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