Ernest Briggs: Ernest Brigg’s volcanic abstract paintings from the 1950’s and 60’s place him firmly in the ranks of the New York Avant-Garde of that era. Until his death in 1984, Briggs continuously explored new ways of combining and changing compositional arrangements and painterly strategies. His compositions are powerful, interpreting nature as a cataclysmic force. Briggs studied at the radical California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco in the early 1950s. It was there, under the tutelage of a faculty that included Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, and Clifford Still, that he developed his rugged aesthetic. His fiery explosions of paint seem to have erupted on the canvas as if by a force of their own. He faced the canvas on his own terms. For the “Twelve Americans” exhibition in 1956 at the Museum of Modern Art, curated by Dorothy Miller, Briggs wrote “the challenge of painting lies explicit in the act – to ...
