Fueled by vodka on ice, the occasional bit of Ecstasy, acid, and innumerable cigarettes, and following an unwavering artistic vision, filmmaker and artist Derek Jarman, who died of AIDS-related causes in 1994, led an outrageous and controversial life.
Jarman’s story stretches from his childhood in the bleakness of post-war Britain to his art school days at the Slade and work as a designer for Frederick Ashton, John Gielgud, and Ken Russell. In recounting Jarman’s life, biographer Tony Peake tells of Jarman’s energetic home movie-making with dazzling friends and a hand-held camera and how it led to distinctive films like Sebastiane, Jubilee, The Tempest, Caravaggio, Wittgenstein, and Blue. Jarman was also a brilliant painter and a gifted gardener; he created a famous and singular garden in the gravel surrounding his simple fisherman’s cottage at Dungeness in Kent.
Peake’s book is also a vivid social and cultural history—an edgy account of a bohemian existence in the warehouse studios that lined the Thames and of a scene and of friends that included artists David Hockney and Robert Mapplethorpe, actors Tilda Swinton and Julian Sands, designer Ossie Clark and many other members of the creative avant garde. A chronicle of sexual fear and repression, the devastation of disease, and inimitable courage and grace in the face of a protracted death, Derek Jarman: A Biography is an honest and brilliant tribute to the uncompromising life and art of Derek Jarman. "Genius is a much overused word, but if Jarman had genius, it resided as much in the sheer incandescence with which he existed as it did in the fruits of the existence." While that "sheer incandescence" is no longer here (Jarman died of AIDS-related causes in 1994), Jarman's art remains. Peake's biography shines because it returns to the art, in which all Jarman's contradictions found their meaning." James Withers in The Advocate
