{"id":5539,"date":"2025-07-18T13:16:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-18T13:16:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/5539\/"},"modified":"2025-07-18T13:16:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-18T13:16:08","slug":"the-hot-tar-splashed-everywhere-remembering-the-dark-magic-of-derek-jarman-derek-jarman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/5539\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018The hot tar splashed everywhere\u2019: remembering the dark magic of Derek Jarman | Derek Jarman"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Modern Nature, his journals, published two years before his death in 1994, Derek Jarman<\/a> described the time his friend David arrived for lunch at Prospect Cottage, Jarman\u2019s home, some time in the summer of 1989. David was carrying an enormous block of pitch.<\/p>\n

The cottage and its boundless garden\u00a0sits on the shingle at Dungeness, a place of immeasurable strangeness and beauty on the Kentish coast. \u201cAfter swimming,\u201d Jarman wrote, \u201cwe built a brick hearth, lit a bonfire, and melted the pitch in an old tin can.\u201d The two men then rushed back and forth between the studio and the pot, fetching brushes, gloves, pillows, barbed wire, crucifixes, prayer books, bullets, a model fighter plane and a\u00a0telephone and set about tarring and\u00a0feathering objects and affixing them on to canvases. \u201cThe hot tar splashed everywhere and set like shining jet,\u201d he observed, with a childlike enthusiasm.<\/p>\n

The artworks in question are part of\u00a0a\u00a0series known as the Black Paintings, now the subject of a two-part chronological survey at Amanda Wilkinson Gallery in London. Jarman started working on these precious miniatures \u2013 most are only a forearm in width \u2013 in 1984. He used oils and found objects, building up from scarlet and gold underlayers. The red and sparkle seep through the impastoed black that encrusts and overwhelms everything on the surface. Broken glass, plastic figurines, a crushed Coca-Cola can, a model boat. When he was nominated for\u00a0the Turner prize in 1986, Jarman exhibited about a dozen of the Black Paintings. The prize went to Gilbert and George, but\u00a0Jarman remained focused, filming The Last of\u00a0England in 1987 and The Garden in 1990, and gradually swapping oils for tar in his paintings.<\/p>\n

Jarman\u2019s journals open with his\u00a0exhilaration at the boundless possibility Dungeness clearly proffered (\u201cthere is more sunlight here\u00a0than anywhere in Britain\u201d) and\u00a0the panic he experienced at the onset of\u00a0the\u00a0Great Storm of October 1987 (a\u00a0neighbouring fisher\u2019s hut disintegrated, \u201c80 years of tar and paint parting like a rifle shot\u201d). He\u00a0had\u00a0been diagnosed with HIV just\u00a0months earlier. The works in the\u00a0show, like the entries in the book, duly trace his alchemical art-making and the pain and outrage of his reckoning with that generational cataclysm. Motifs including Christ\u2019s crown of thorns and blood surface in the works\u2019 iconography.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe didn\u2019t think of himself as a film-maker or a gardener or a painter or a political activist,\u201d Wilkinson says. \u201cHe wasn\u2019t a queer artist. He was an artist. All of that was his art.\u201d Fabled punk chronicler Jon Savage, who was\u00a0close to Jarman, recently emphasised to the gallerist how crucial this point is. \u201cYou mustn\u2019t pin Derek down,\u201d he said. \u201cYou can\u2019t pin Derek down. You can\u2019t put him in any box. He\u00a0would always resist it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Former lovers and friends often refer to Jarman\u2019s agitated energy, his enthusiasm. He was the most colourful man they had ever met, someone who had crazy ideas every day, an interlocutor with whom conversation remains, in death, just as strong and empowering as it was when he was alive. And anyone who has one of these Black Paintings (there is no official tally; unknowns keep emerging) knows to treasure it deeply. \u201cHe just made everybody feel good,\u201d Wilkinson says. \u201cHe was so charming and funny and charismatic. Everybody loved Derek Jarman.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Black Paintings: A Chronology Part\u00a02 is at the Amanda Wilkinson Gallery, London<\/a>, to 13 September<\/p>\n

His dark materials: five works from the exhibition<\/p>\n

Exit 1988 (main image)
Jarman wasn\u2019t afraid to be complex, Wilkinson says. And he remained resolute and bright-eyed at the end of his life. \u201cI do not wish to die \u2026 yet,\u201d he wrote in the summer of 1990, overwhelmed by the number of pills he has to take, his strength ebbing and flowing like the tide on the shingle outside. \u201cI would love to see my garden through several summers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Photograph: Keith Collins Will Trust and Amanda Wilkinson<\/p>\n

Death Is All Things We See Awake 1991
Jarman\u2019s films, writing and paintings are steeped in his reading. Here, he was inspired by a quote from the philosopher Heraclitus. \u201cJarman was fun, but he was a serious person,\u201d Wilkinson says, \u201ccultured, not in a snobby way but in a deep-thinking way.\u201d<\/p>\n

skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n

Sign up to Inside Saturday<\/p>\n

The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend.<\/p>\n

Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n

Photograph: Keith Collins Will Trust and Amanda Wilkinson<\/p>\n

Mirror Mirror 1988
Mirrors connect back to Jarman\u2019s Super 8 films and feature in his paintings. In the summer of 1989, he recorded buying one at a fair along with an old sickle and a copy of Blonde on Blonde by Bob Dylan. \u201cEveryone sighs when you mention the \u2018Born Again\u2019 [Dylan],\u201d he wrote in Modern Nature, \u201cbut his voice echoed through a 60s summer almost as idyllic as this one.\u201d<\/p>\n

Photograph: Keith Collins Will Trust and Amanda Wilkinson<\/p>\n

Untitled (Clothes) 1989
Old gardening overalls and feathers from a disused pillow are employed here in a reference, Wilkinson posits, to an intense scene in Jarman\u2019s 1990 film The Garden in which a gay couple are subjected to being tarred and feathered.<\/p>\n

Photograph: Keith Collins Will Trust and Amanda Wilkinson<\/p>\n

INRI (Cross of Thorns) 1990
The Garden uses the story of Christ as a persecuted man as an analogy of sorts for the persecution of queer people. \u201cHe was very interested in the figure of Christ,\u201d says Wilkinson. He would routinely visit churches with the art historian Simon Watney.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Modern Nature, his journals, published two years before his death in 1994, Derek Jarman described the time…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5540,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":["post-5539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5539"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5539\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}