The one person show at Berta Walker Gallery presents a selection of Diggs’ most recent colorful, emotional, abstract paintings. Arts writer Artist Andre Van der Wende, in his just-published Provincetown Arts article on Joe Diggs, exclaims: “His recent work is an astonishing triumph of patterning, as moving as it is celebratory… a zenith of repetition folded within the organic roll of it, creating a spellbinding experience.” When asked about his art making point-of-view, Diggs has said: “By allowing impromptu action, I let go of the desire to control everything in the artistic process. This grants me a voyeuristic space in which I can operate…I am a voyeur and medium wrapped into one person. I blend figuration and abstraction with the basis in landscape, which gives me the space to make work that is both gestural and emotionally hypnotic.”
Honored as Artist of the Year by The Arts Foundation of Cape Cod, Joe Diggs is being presented in two major exhibitions this summer: Evolving Circles, Provincetown Art Association and Museum, July 18 - September 7 and Berta Walker Gallery July 25 - August 17. The one person show at Berta Walker Gallery presents a selection of Diggs’ most recent colorful, emotional, abstract paintings. Arts writer Artist Andre Van der Wende, in his just-published Provincetown Arts article on Joe Diggs, exclaims: “His recent work is an astonishing triumph of patterning, as moving as it is celebratory… a zenith of repetition folded within the organic roll of it, creating a spellbinding experience.” When asked about his art making point-of-view, Diggs has said: “By allowing impromptu action, I let go of the desire to control everything in the artistic process. This grants me a voyeuristic space in which I can operate…I am a voyeur and medium wrapped into one person. I blend figuration and abstraction with the basis in landscape, which gives me the space to make work that is both gestural and emotionally hypnotic.”
Battleboro Museum of Art’s Chief Curator Mara Williams, also Curator of Evolving Circles, in her essay about Diggs in the exhibition catalog, has noted: “Joseph Diggs’ creative energy flows from a deeply rooted sense of place and personal history, in paintings memorizing and celebrating the family owned properties that have nurtured and protected multiple generations of his African-American/Cape Verdean family, located in the village of Osterville, a Tony enclave on Cape Cod, art resists categorization….It toggles between figuration and abstraction to a tangle of swooping brush strokes, glancing lines, and dripping swathes of paint.’
Along with his sensual abstract paintings, featuring inventive and ever changing perspectives and expressive use of color and tone, Diggs breathes new life in the centuries old genre of landscape painting.
Seph Rodney, art historian and art writer, writes “The abstract paintings are marvels — every one. It’s difficult to describe what he’s doing in these paintings because he never stops changing. I see an entire extended family of art historical ancestors that, though related, never read as produced by a mentor-pupil relationship. I see Hundertwasser and Jack Winton, Frank Bowling and Gerhard Richter. I see Helen Frankenthaler and Minor White….At the end of the day after my Studio visit with Joe, I asked myself how Diggs’s imagination became so large, conduit for so much.”
Born in France and traveling the world with his military family, Diggs settled in Osterville, Mass., as a youth. There his family ran Joe's Twin Villa, a bar and "Blues" place. He received his BFA in 1984 at Southwestern University in North Dartmouth, Mass.,and continued to paint, while flying around the world as an airline attendant, owning and running a bar, and managing properties. And almost 30 years later, in 2015, he completed his MFA at Massachusetts College of Art and Design low residency at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown. Rodney notes: “All the contrasts and inklings of worlds he’s inhabited and worlds just glimpsed come out in [Joe Diggs’s] paintings.”
