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VINTAGE

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London SW1V 2SA

Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

Copyright © Derek Jarman 1994

Derek Jarman has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

The chapter ‘Into the Blue’ is taken from Blue, a film by Derek Jarman. Copyright © Basilisk Communications Ltd 1993. This material appears by kind permission of the producers of the film.

First published in Great Britain by Century in 1994

Published by Vintage in 2000

penguin.co.uk/vintage

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Contents

About the Book

In Chroma, Derek Jarman explains the use of colour in Medieval painting through the Renaissance to the modernists and draws on the great colour theorists from Pliny to Leonardo. He also talks about the meaning of colours in literature, science, philosophy, psychology, religion and alchemy. The colours on Jarman’s palette are mixed with memory and insight to create an evocative and highly personal work.

About the Author

Derek Jarman’s creativity spanned decades and genres – painter, theatre designer, director, film maker, writer and gardener.

From his first one-man show at the Lisson Gallery in 1969; set designs and costumes for the theatre and ballet (Jazz Calendar with Frederick Ashton at Covent Garden, Don Giovanni with John Gielgud at the London Coliseum, The Rake’s Progress with Ken Russell at Teatro Communale, Florence); production design for Ken Russell’s films The Devils and Savage Messiah; through his own films in super-8 before working on features: Sebastine (1976), Jubilee (1978), The Tempest (1979), The Angelic Conversation (1985), Caravaggio (1986), The Last of England (1987), War Requiem (1989), The Garden (1990), Edward II (1991), Wittgenstein (1993), and Blue (1993); to directing pop-videos and live performances for Pet Shop Boys and Suede.

His paintings – for which he was a Turner Prize nominee in 1986 – have been exhibited world-wide.

His garden surrounding the fisherman’s cottage in Dungeness where he spent the last years of his life remains a site of awe and pilgrimage to fans and newcomers to Jarman’s singular vision.

His publications include: Dancing Ledge (1984), Kicking the Pricks (1987), Modern Nature (1991), At Your Own Risk (1992), Chroma (1994), Derek Jarman’s Garden (1995).

Also by Derek Jarman

Dancing Ledge

The Last of England

Modern Nature

At Your Own Risk

Chroma

Smiling in Slow Motion

Chroma

A Book of Colour – June ’93

Introduction

(Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting)

When Mark, my editor, came down to Prospect Cottage we talked of colour. Of blues and reds, and how the research last year for the Blue Concert, which Simon Turner is performing in front of the Golden Temple in Kyoto at this very moment, threw me deep into the spectrum. Mark has gone now. I sit here in the silence of my new room, from which I can see the power station at Dungeness in the twilight:

(Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour)

In the morning I looked through the indexes of my books – who had written on colour? There was colour in … philosophy … psychiatry … medicine … as well as art, and observations echoed across the centuries:

(Alberti, op. cit.)

This one from thirty years ago …

I dream of a ‘Glastonbury Festival’. There are thousands of people camping around a pure white classical house isolated on a perfect green sward. Above the front door, the frieze on the tympanum is painted in pure pastel colours depicting the good deeds of the owner. Whose house is this? The answer is given to me by one of the revellers – ‘The house of Salvador Dali.’

Since then I’ve looked at Dali’s paintings and found little colour in them.

As a child I became aware of colour and its changes, distempering the walls of a mildewed RAF Nissen hut. My father placed a bright yellow rubber dinghy on the lawn, used a hosepipe to fill it, and after we finished work we swam in the golden water. Ever after, I thought of water as yellow and struggled as a teenager painting reflections – and then ‘the Moderns’ marched in before I had time to get to the Academy.

Or this sound advice …

(Kasimir Malevich, Essays on Art)

May my black Waterman ink spill out the truth.

Chemistry and romantic names – manganese violet, caerulean, ultramarine, and distant places, Naples yellow. The geography of colour, Antwerp blue, raw Sienna. Colour stretching to the distant planets – Mars violet; named after old masters – Van Dyke brown. Contradictory – Lampblack.

(trans. Khan, Heraclitus)

At school if I wasn’t playing at Impressionists or Post-Impressionists (copying Van Gogh blossom and ingratiating myself with Miss Smith, the matron, by giving her my faltering copy) I was trying to make the colours frighten each other … In the background black and white images flickered on the TV. I escaped from this into the cinema, where colour was better than the real thing.

(Ad Reinhardt, California)

All colour smells of turpentine and rich linseed oil pressed from the pale blue flax fields. Local colour from coloured fields. The cricket bat dipped with the brush. Death hangs around the brush – pigs’ bristle, squirrel, sable, and the canvas prepared with rabbit skin glue.

I learnt colour but did not understand it.

I collected the little pans of watercolour, sticky in their silver wrappings, but never opened them. Scarlet lake. Ivory black. Windsor blue. New gamboge. I worked in grown-up oils.

Trips up to London in the holidays to Brodie and Middleton, Colourmen of Covent Garden, makers of cheap oil paint in tins. ‘Brunswick green’ my cheap favourite. Vermilion, très cher mes amis, très cher these reds. Yes, the reds cost us. The colours in my paintings were dictated by cost. I mixed on a glass palette, colours that went beyond Windsor and Isaac Newton – nameless colours …

Others we named ourselves …

GOOSE TURD GREEN or VOMIT.

What is pure colour?

(Wittgenstein, op. cit.)

Where in red is the true red? The original prime colour to which all other reds aspire?

Teenage musings stuck with tubes of students’ Georgian colour. (Artists’ colour beyond our pockets.) I left university and hitch-hiked to Greece. White islands, blue washed walls, white marble phalloi at Delos, blue cornflowers, the scent of thyme.

I returned to London on the back of a lorry where I started as a painting student at the Slade, as the leaves turned brown on the plane trees and a slight blue mist fuzzed the soot-black churches.

In the Sixties, boys started to wash between their legs. Do you remember those adverts for B.O.?

And along with the boys, London scrubbed off its sooty nineteenth-century patina. Meanwhile, the paintings were being scrubbed of the patina of centuries by Mr Lucas of the National Gallery. Some said he was actually repainting them completely. When he wasn’t knocking up a Sodoma he taught us how to grind colours and prime canvas.

A trip to Cornelissen in Great Queen Street, a shop that had been there for 200 years, with jars of pigment glinting like jewels in the semi-dark, where I bought the colours to make my own paint. Manganese blue and violet. Ultramarine blue and violet and the brightest permanent green. These colours carried health warnings – a black and scarlet skull and cross-bones, and the words DANGER – DO NOT INHALE.

My first day at the Slade … lost in the early morning corridors, alone and nervously waiting for the life class in the huge drawing studio, when suddenly a jolly middle-aged lady with gaudily hennaed hair appeared in a floral kimono from behind a screen. I hadn’t noticed her when I’d come in. I stared wide-eyed as she threw off the flowers and stood stark naked in front of me – not at all like the demure Botticelli Venus that I expected, more like the Duchess of York.

‘How do you want me, darling?’

Noting my embarrassed silence, she said, ‘Oh, artistic!’ and took up a pose, instructing me to draw round her with blue chalk. Red in the face, with a shaking hand, I did as she commanded. You see, I was very green. The Slade professor, Sir William Coldstream, appeared high on the balcony that led from his office to the life studio to observe what was going on. I sat on my donkey, trying to cover my first and inexpert charcoal marks from his gaze. Life as a painter had begun.

Grey was the colour of the Slade. Sir William wore grey suits. My-tutor, Maurice Field, who had iron-grey hair, wore an iron-grey laboratory coat. Squinting at me through his gold-rimmed spectacles he said, ‘I know nothing about modern colour – but we could talk of Bonnard.’ So we talked of Bonnard. And he said hardly a word about my work. Maurice had taught Sir William to paint slowly, and Sir William had taught all the other tutors to paint even slower. But we were a generation in a hurry. After all, The Bomb was expected to drop at any moment. So the Slade style, after the model, with little flat, grey areas and pink crosses to show you had measured her up with a pencil held at arm’s length, painting the paraphernalia of painting, held little interest for me. At school I’d left the Post-Impressionists behind, had dabbled like a child in a sweetshop in Cubism, Suprematism, Surrealism, Dada (which, I noted, wasn’t an ‘… ism’) and finally in Tachism and Action painting.

After I’d got through the modern movement in my neighbour Güta’s attic, I took to conventional British landscapes – the first work I recognised as my own. The gift of summer days spent drawing in the Quantocks, in the little lanes that led down to the Bristol Channel at Kilve. Red earth and dark green hedges. My maiden aunts admired the results. I grew more adventurous, and painted a series of interiors entirely in pink, abandoned them and took to shrill colouring again. Arsenic greens fought out the pinks until they in turn were swallowed and defeated by monochrome.

(Christina Georgina Rossetti, ‘What Is Pink?’ From Sing-Song)

White Lies

(Leonardo da Vinci, Advice to Artists)

Potters Bar fête 1906. I still have a cherished postcard from which I painted several pictures as a teenager. Edwardian girls in long white dresses, lampshade hats and frilly parasols blown like thistledown out of the nineteenth century. Who were they? Looking so solemn under the fluttering bunting. Facing the swings and roundabouts of life. I don’t know what I found so alluring about these girls in white dresses in the parks, piers and promenades, paddling in the sea with their skirts hitched up in paintings by Wilson Steer. Turn of the century white, inspired perhaps by Whistler’s monochromatic portrait The White Girl. Throw a paint pot in the public’s face and they will catch it. Here they are again, sitting in the garden on white garden benches, sipping tea from white porcelain, the gift of China, looking at a postcard from an elder brother who is climbing Mont Blanc. Dreaming of white weddings …

Ghostly white postcards. As I look at them now, the girls are blissfully unaware of the wall of death which will change their Sunday best but not its colour, a few short years ahead. They will become nurses, factory girls, maybe engineers or even aviators. Behind the postcard there is white. Behind the painting there is white ground.

White stretches back. Was white created in the Big Bang? Was the bang itself white?

In the beginning was white. And God made it, of all the colours, and this was a secret until Sir Isaac Newton sat in a darkened room late in the seventeenth century:

(Sir Isaac Newton, Opticks)

Looking back through Sir Isaac’s prism, is it possible to see Osiris, the God of the White Nile, God of Resurrection and rebirth, in his white crown and white sandals, devoid of colour? Then white was without colour, something which after Newton we can no longer experience. Perhaps the green sceptre that the God holds to herald the return of spring, like the snowdrop, tells us this.

White is the dead mid-winter, pure and chaste, the snowdrop, Galanthus nivalis (Candlemas bells), decorated the churches on February the second, the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin … but don’t bring those snowdrops into your house – they’ll bring you bad luck, you might even drop dead: for the snowdrop is the flower of the dead, resembling a corpse in its shroud. White is the colour of mourning except in the Christian West where it is black – but the object of mourning is white. Whoever heard of a corpse in a black shroud?

If you spin a colour wheel fast enough it turns white, but if you mix the pigments, however much you try, you will only get a dirty grey.

(Johann von Goethe, Theory of Colour)

Light in our darkness.