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

In 1989, the artist was living on the Kentish coast when he created a series of mysterious paintings with a bonfire and tar. A new exhibition brings these so-called Black Paintings to life – and shows why they still resonate todayIn 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. Continue reading...

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