J. Richard Briggs is a genre-based landscape painter with a penchant for exploring contemporary expressions of religious iconography. His work contains visual language that fuses sacred symbolism, emotional depth, and surrealist atmosphere to explore the collision between the transcendent and the profoundly human. Influenced by Byzantine iconography, rabbinical Jewish storytelling, Eastern European sculpture, and 20th-century American regionalism, his work spans figural compositions, still life, sacred narratives, and landscapes that frame the natural world as sacred witness to a universal human longing for groundedness in an age of anxiety and fragmentation. Briggs studied anatomical representational art at Watts Atelier (2019-2020) and Hebrew language and Jewish art history at the University of Haifa and Hebrew University in Jerusalem (2011-2013). His exhibitions include the solo show “Radical Hospitality” (Frame and Hang Art Gallery, 2018) and “Subversive Faith” (Liberty Station, San Diego, 2023). He is represented by GO Gallery (formerly Gaurdino Gallery) in Portland, Oregon. His paintings serve as ecumenical altarpieces that invite contemplation of nature and sacred Christian texts, welcoming all seekers into moments of stillness, spiritual tension, and transcendent encounter.