biography
DIGGLE, Philip, painter, M.A., Art History, Chelsea School of Art.
Giant canvasses, layers and layers of paint, fumes drifting down the stairs. You are at a Philip Diggle exhibition.
Philip Diggle lives and breathes his work. During the 70s and 80s, his association with the Punk movement gave rise to the much publicised and celebrated gigs where he painted on stage with his brother Steve Diggle, guitarist and vocalist in the punk band Buzzcocks.
The Camden Chronicles 2010 documents his artistic journey and early 80s life in Royal College Street, Camden, reflecting his Sartrean, existential thoughts. The poets Verlaine and Rimbaud lived in the same street.
In recent times, the genius of Philip Diggle’s modernist action paintings have been recognised by the American corporate business world who are buying his work as part of their investment portfolios. Diggle’s work now hangs in prominent collections such as Chase Manhattan Bank and the Rockefeller Centre N.Y., as well as many private collections and boardrooms around the world.
Critic Clement Greenberg remarked of Diggle’s work, “You sure can paint an ugly image.”
“IT’S A FANTASTIC CELEBRATION OF COLOUR AND TEXTURE AND ATMOSPHERE.”
– Mel Gooding
Diggle lives like an ascetic, and paints like a demon. He works fast but takes as long as he needs to make a painting, get it right. Getting it right is knowing when to stop. He works best on a human scale, within or to the limit of the arms span: his paintings are the direct outcome of intense and immediate physical actions and reactions. He follows the flux of the paint, letting automatic gesture discover form in the fields of colour that expand and contract as the painting develops, sometimes disappearing to become an underground glimpsed through the arabesque and movements of later application. He piles on the paint, rubs it down and soaks it out, smears and brushes away areas of the surface, piles on the paint again, sweeps it and drags it, leaving passages of rich impasto, encrustations and layerings, with a brilliantly active surface play of whiplash and dribble, arbitrary line and hieroglyphic flourish.
Diggle works continuously with chance but leaves nothing to it. his paintings are the sum of a multitude of split-second decisions, interspersed with hours of contemplation, over weeks or months. Their rhythms and counterpoints of colour, and of light and darkness; their textual complexity; their structural tensions; their objective density and weight: these are the pay-off of a fiercely committed energy and of an undivided attention to the work in hand. Behind the virtuoso painting performance is the quirky and original mind that is open to anything that might deepen the game and provoke new insights; that feeds on Beckett, Joyce, Kafka and Shakespeare, playing games with associations and cross currents. Diggle’s work is enlivened by a constant play of oppositions, each painting an abstract drama of visual events, a material metaphor for the invisible dynamics of the world it reflects.
MEL GOODING
PHILIP DIGGLE'S WORK FROM THE
SEVENTIES
PHILIP DIGGLE’S WORK FROM THE
EIGHTIES
PHILIP DIGGLE'S WORK FROM THE
NINETIES
PHILIP DIGGLE'S WORK FROM