‘The hot tar splashed everywhere': remembering the dark magic of Derek Jarman

The Guardian

18-07-2025

In Modern Nature, his journals, published two years before his death in 1994, Derek Jarman described the time his friend David arrived for lunch at Prospect Cottage, Jarman's home, some time in the summer of 1989. David was carrying an enormous block of pitch.
The cottage and its boundless garden sits on the shingle at Dungeness, a place of immeasurable strangeness and beauty on the Kentish coast. 'After swimming,' Jarman wrote, 'we built a brick hearth, lit a bonfire, and melted the pitch in an old tin can.' 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 telephone and set about tarring and feathering objects and affixing them on to canvases. 'The hot tar splashed everywhere and set like shining jet,' he observed, with a childlike enthusiasm.
The artworks in question are part of a series 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 – most are only a forearm in width – 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 the Turner prize in 1986, Jarman exhibited about a dozen of the Black Paintings. The prize went to Gilbert and George, but Jarman remained focused, filming The Last of England in 1987 and The Garden in 1990, and gradually swapping oils for tar in his paintings.
Jarman's journals open with his exhilaration at the boundless possibility Dungeness clearly proffered ('there is more sunlight here than anywhere in Britain') and the panic he experienced at the onset of the Great Storm of October 1987 (a neighbouring fisher's hut disintegrated, '80 years of tar and paint parting like a rifle shot'). He had been diagnosed with HIV just months earlier. The works in the show, 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's crown of thorns and blood surface in the works' iconography.
'He didn't think of himself as a film-maker or a gardener or a painter or a political activist,' Wilkinson says. 'He wasn't a queer artist. He was an artist. All of that was his art.' Fabled punk chronicler Jon Savage, who was close to Jarman, recently emphasised to the gallerist how crucial this point is. 'You mustn't pin Derek down,' he said. 'You can't pin Derek down. You can't put him in any box. He would always resist it.'
Former lovers and friends often refer to Jarman's 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. 'He just made everybody feel good,' Wilkinson says. 'He was so charming and funny and charismatic. Everybody loved Derek Jarman.'
The Black Paintings: A Chronology Part 2 is at the Amanda Wilkinson Gallery, London, to 13 September
Exit 1988 (main image)Jarman wasn't afraid to be complex, Wilkinson says. And he remained resolute and bright-eyed at the end of his life. 'I do not wish to die … yet,' 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. 'I would love to see my garden through several summers.'
Death Is All Things We See Awake 1991Jarman's films, writing and paintings are steeped in his reading. Here, he was inspired by a quote from the philosopher Heraclitus. 'Jarman was fun, but he was a serious person,' Wilkinson says, 'cultured, not in a snobby way but in a deep-thinking way.'
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Mirror Mirror 1988Mirrors connect back to Jarman's 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. 'Everyone sighs when you mention the 'Born Again' [Dylan],' he wrote in Modern Nature, 'but his voice echoed through a 60s summer almost as idyllic as this one.'
Untitled (Clothes) 1989Old gardening overalls and feathers from a disused pillow are employed here in a reference, Wilkinson posits, to an intense scene in Jarman's 1990 film The Garden in which a gay couple are subjected to being tarred and feathered.
INRI (Cross of Thorns) 1990The Garden uses the story of Christ as a persecuted man as an analogy of sorts for the persecution of queer people. 'He was very interested in the figure of Christ,' says Wilkinson. He would routinely visit churches with the art historian Simon Watney.