Derek Jarman the painter

Time Out‘s visual arts editor Ossian Ward takes a close look at Jarman the painter

He may be best known for his work as a filmmaker but Derek Jarman was foremost a painter. He trained at the Slade from 1963-1967, falling under the spell of Swinging London’s most successful artists Patrick Proctor and David Hockney, but stuck to his own minimalist style of abstract landscape painting rather than emulating his pop art-oriented contemporaries. Although his skills in set design and filmmaking would increasingly take precedence over his fine art, it’s arguable that his moving images were just another form of painting. ‘Caravaggio’, for example, is full of scenes and characters faithfully cropped and composed after the Old Master’s work.

In 1984, the same time that ‘Caravaggio’ was taking shape, Jarman staged a retrospective of his art at the ICA. The show centred on a new series of pictures called ‘GBH’, which stood either for ‘Great British Horror’ or ‘Gargantuan Bloody H-Bomb’. They were untidy, angry works that chimed with the outspoken political viewpoints that Jarman had set out in ‘Jubilee’.

In later life, it was to his first beloved form of expression that he returned. ‘The paintings are just as interesting as the films,’ he remarked, although there was a note of resignation in his voice. Painting became a cathartic process for Jarman: just look at his shockingly dark later works in black paint and tar from 1986-1991. Tubes and tubes of paint were expended on to small canvases, before bits of driftwood, dishevelled objects or smashed glass were embedded into the still-wet void. These stormy seas are loaded with references to childhood – buttons, seashells and old family photos encrust the surfaces – as well as religious symbols; they reek of the fear of death. In one artwork, the blackened bones of a skeletal hand hang in an obsidian field next to a squashed Coke can, bearing the legend ‘It’s the real thing’.

Tabloid rage in 'Tragedy' from 1992

There’s depth in Jarman’s use of layering: he secreted tabloid covers beneath furious swipes of paint that faintly scream out headlines including ‘What’s it like to be dying of Aids?’ or, slightly less seriously, ‘Lesbian teacher horror’. He even left canvas behind entirely for a series of tar- and feather-spattered mattress pieces, some of which he’d lie on with his boyfriend in the gallery, prefiguring both Tracey Emin’s notorious slept-in bed piece and the New York billboards of two ghostly pillows in an empty bed by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who also died of Aids two years after Jarman.

The power of what Jarman called ‘the most awful paintings’ he could make, was in his proximity to their overriding subject matter. They are the primal pleas of a man about to meet his maker; relentless and dark visions of a life obliterated by sadness. He may not have been the most gifted or subtle painter, but there’s no disguising the raw energy that remained with him until the end. His relentless focus is neatly summed up in one triptych of violent pictures from 1993 on to which he scrawled: ‘Death’, ‘Sex’ and ‘Love’.

‘Derek’ is on More4, Feb 19. ‘Derek Jarman, curated by Isaac Julien’ is at the Serpentine from Feb 23.