Philip Diggle: Here and Now

About

This exhibition, his seventh at Highgate Gallery, marks a new departure for acclaimed artist Philip Diggle, who is inspired by an enduring fascination for the physicality of oil paint and the “intense physical process” he calls painting.

Wildly exuberant and massive, his large-scale abstract paintings in oil and enamel fill the gallery with an almost untamed energy.  Painted on canvas tarpaulin, the overall impression is of action, of power straining to be let loose.  By contrast, alongside these works sit smaller expressionistic self-portraits, and other heads, their surfaces heavily encrusted.  As well as expressing the turbulence of the ‘here and now’, they have a positivity and stability that is ultimately life affirming.  Philip says of his work, “My Dionysiac perpetual mobile is an attempt ‘to grasp authentic being by action, decision, a leap of faith.’”

As critic Mel Gooding put it, Diggle’s paintings are “a fantastic celebration of colour and texture and atmosphere … enlivened by a constant play of oppositions, each an abstract drama of visual events, a material metaphor for the invisible dynamics of the world it reflects.”

In addition to the works on the walls, Philip will have smaller unframed works on paper available at weekends which reflect themes of the exhibition as a whole.