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VINTAGE letters and diaries to inspire you

Journals vol. 1

Dancing Ledge

Jarman's light illuminates the wilderness as brightly as ever

Jarman [is] the sort of troublemaking visionary who one day may be compared with Blake

Derek Jarman was born in London in 1942. His career spanned decades and genres, from painter, theatre designer, director, film maker, to poet, writer, campaigner and gardener. His features include Sebastiane (1976), Jubilee (1978), Caravaggio (1986), The Last of England (1987), Edward II (1991) and Blue (1993). His paintings – for which he was a Turner Prize nominee in 1986 – continue to be exhibited worldwide, and his garden in Dungeness remains a site of pilgrimage to fans and newcomers alike.

'What started as a book on the frustration of funding led to the writing of an autobiography at forty... I had so little to do in the daylight hours, I stayed up late unbuttoning Levis in back rooms.' 
 
In 1984 at the age of 40, the polymath film-maker Derek Jarman began to write his journals. In the first of these diaries, Dancing Ledge, we see his origins as a young artist, written with Jarman's distinctive immediacy, curiosity, and candour. Behind-the-scenes of his first controversial films and stage designs, at glamorous launch parties with friends like David Hockney, Ossie Clarke and Patrick Proktor, to the trials of securing funding, Dancing Ledge is a coming-of-age memoir for all fledgling artists. 
 
Dancing Ledge also chronicles a unique time in British history, capturing gay nightlife from the end of the war to the beginning of the AIDS epidemic.

A Book of Colour - June '93

Chroma

A poetic, passionate and intensely personal exploration of colour written during the final year of Derek Jarman's life -- with a new introduction by Ali Smith.

Chroma is more than an Aids autobiography...it is a paean to colour...Shot through with sass and moving testimony...this complexly written, yet stylish and readable book locates most powerfully the sublimal brilliance of one artist

Chroma sparks off pieces of Jarman's poetry and prose against fragments that span Ovid, Alberti, Goethe and Wittgenstein...to form a highly personal reflection on colour, a keleidoscopic experience that throws out different facets like a prism in the light

Full of anger, wit, emotion, and knowledge, this collection informs and astounds...Immensely powerful

Jarman reminds us how much there is to be smelled, observed and listened to in the world if we do not walk past it

The context of the writing of this book inevitably turns it from an amusing bricollage to a gesture of extraordinary generosity, a tribute to the continuing need to create and communicate on the very edge of darkness

A poetic, passionate and intensely personal exploration of colour written during the final year of Derek Jarman's life -- with a new introduction by Ali Smith. 
 
In Chroma, his most poetic and lyrical book, Derek Jarman explores the uses of colour. Shifting across the spectrum and from the medieval to the modern, he draws on the work of great colour theorists from Pliny to Leonardo. Interwoven with these musings are evocative memories from Jarman's childhood and illustrious career, along with reflections on his deteriorating health. 
 
Written a year before Jarman’s death, and as his eyesight was failing, this is an intensely personal work; a paean from an artist seeking to memorialise the extraordinary power of colour even while it receded from his own life.

A Saint's Testament

At Your Own Risk

Impassioned, witty and polemical, At Your Own Risk is Derek Jarman's defiant celebration of gay sexuality.

If there is any such thing as the literary equivalent of an incendiary bomb, then this is it... His semtex-packed sentences are welcome thunderflashes of dissent in the grey drizzle of a dispirited political climate

At Your Own Risk gives the reader access to something that is hard to articulate, the near asphyxiating pain, anxiety and rage which many gay people have felt living under the physical, legal and cultural attacks of the last few years

For all his anger, Jarman never seems brutalised. He retains his humanity and good humour. His is a wonderfully garrulous, mercurial, polymathic daemon

Derek Jarman (Author) Derek Jarman was born in London in 1942. His career spanned decades and genres, from painter, theatre designer, director, film maker, to poet, writer, campaigner and gardener. His features include Sebastiane (1976), Jubilee (1978), Caravaggio (1986), The Last of England (1987), Edward II (1991) and Blue (1993). His paintings – for which he was a Turner Prize nominee in 1986 – continue to be exhibited worldwide, and his garden in Dungeness remains a site of pilgrimage to fans and newcomers alike. Matthew Todd (Introducer) Matthew Todd is one of the UKs leading gay writers. He was the editor of the UK's bestselling gay magazine, Attitude, between 2008 and 2016 where he won three British Society of Magazine Editors Editor of the Year Awards, a Stonewall Journalist of the Year Award and was given the Freedom of the City of London. Prince William made history by sitting for the cover of Matthew's final issue as editor. 
 
 
Matthew's first book, Straight Jacket was voted Boyz LGBT Book of the Year 2017, and has been called 'an essential read for every gay person on the planet' by Sir Elton John, 'utterly brilliant' by Owen Jones and as 'game changing' and 'life saving' by readers. 
 
 
He has written for national newspapers, including the Guardian, Observer, Telegraph and Sun. He appears regularly on TV and radio and is a regular speaker at conferences and events, including the Terrence Higgins Trust HIV Prevention CHAPS conference. He lives in London. His work appears in This Is Not A Drill (Penguin), Letters to the Earth (Harper Collins) and The Queer Bible (HQ). His second book PRIDE: The Story of the LGBTQ Equality Movement (Welbeck) is out now.

Impassioned, witty and polemical, At Your Own Risk is Derek Jarman's defiant celebration of gay sexuality. 
 
In At Your Own Risk, Derek Jarman weaves poetry, prose, photographs and newspaper extracts into a rich tapestry of gay experience in the UK. The buttoned-up repression of the fifties and sixties makes way for liberation and free love in the seventies, only to be chased by the terror and pain of HIV/AIDS. This is Jarman at his passionate best, written when he was already ill with HIV and in the midst of the moral panic surrounding the AIDS crisis. Defiant and furious, he not only celebrates his own sexuality but skewers wider society for its brazen homophobia. 
 
Reissued here 25 years after Jarman's death, with an introduction by Straight Jacket author Matthew Todd, At Your Own Risk remains a singular work. It is a powerful reminder of how far we have come and how much further we have left to go. 
 
'It blew my mind quite honestly !', It's A Sin star Olly Alexander via Twitter

Journals, 1991–1994

Smiling in Slow Motion

'The life-affirming expression of an artist engaged in living to the full' The Times

Gossipy, candid, funny, and, as Jarman’s illness takes hold, powerfully moving

Present on every page is the creative sparkle and compellingly generous spirit of a man who was in every way an uncompromising individual

In these diaries... the artist and film director emerges as a down-to-earth visionary... this perceptive and enjoyable work is something of a miracle

For all his anger, Jarman never seems brutalised. He retains his humanity and his good humour. His is a wonderfully garrulous, mercurial, polymathic daemon

Derek Jarman was born in London in 1942. His career spanned decades and genres, from painter, theatre designer, director, film-maker, to poet, writer, campaigner and gardener. His features include Sebastiane (1976), Jubilee (1978), Caravaggio (1986), The Last of England (1987), Edward II (1991) and Blue (1993). His paintings – for which he was a Turner Prize nominee in 1986 – continue to be exhibited worldwide, and his garden in Dungeness remains a site of pilgrimage to fans and newcomers alike.

'The life-affirming expression of an artist engaged in living to the full' The Times 
 
 Smiling in Slow Motion is Derek Jarman's last journal, stretching from May 1991 until a fortnight before his death in February 1994. Jarman writes with his trademark humour and candour about friends and enemies, as he races through his final years of film-making, gardening and radical political protest. 
 
 Written from Jarman's Charing Cross Road flat, his famed garden at Dungeness, and finally from his bed in St Bartholomew's Hospital, Jarman meditates on his own deteriorating health and the loss of his contemporaries. Yet Smiling in Slow Motion is not simply a chronicle of illness and regret: it is, at its heart, one of endeavour, determination and pride. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY NEIL BARTLETT

Journals, 1989 – 1990

Modern Nature

A very special book – a divine, meditative and inspiring diary of Derek Jarman's famous garden at Dungeness.

The most beautiful &amp; furious book of all time

An essential – urgent – book for the 21st Century

Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director of the Serpentine Gallery

Jarman gave his garden a certain narrative; perhaps he treated it a bit like a film or theatre set. His films were visionary, eccentric, romantic and rebellious, all of which could also be said about his garden

It's hard not to warm to the man who, in the face of all the personal and professional hardships described in this book, can still regard himself as 'the most fortunate film-maker of my generation

Joy and life and more life and more joy and street corners and making a garden out of stones and making films and love

Read this meditative and inspiring diary of Derek Jarman's famous garden at Dungeness, which is also a powerful account of his life as an HIV positive man in the 1980s. 
 
 In 1986 Derek Jarman discovered he was HIV positive and decided to make a garden at his cottage on the barren coast of Dungeness. 
 
 Facing an uncertain future, he nevertheless found solace in nature, growing all manner of plants. While some perished beneath wind and sea-spray others flourished, creating brilliant, unexpected beauty in the wilderness. 
 
 Modern Nature is both a diary of the garden and a meditation by Jarman on his own life: his childhood, his time as a young gay man in the 1960s, his renowned career as an artist, writer and film-maker. It is at once a lament for a lost generation, an unabashed celebration of gay sexuality, and a devotion to all that is living. 
 
 'An essential - urgent - book for the 21st Century' Hans Ulrich Obrist 
 
 This new edition features an introduction from Olivia Laing, the author of Crudo

Collected Film Scripts

Up in the Air

Published for the first time, Up in the Air is a collection of film scripts by one of Britain's most original film-makers, artists and writers, the legendary Derek Jarman.

Derek Jarman- painter, theatre designer and filmmaker- held his first one man show at the Lisson Gallery in 1969. He designed sets and costumes for the theatre (Jazz Calendar with Frederick Ashton and Don Giovanni at the Coliseum). He was production designer for Ken Russell's films The Devils and Savage Messiah, during which time he worked on his own films in Super 8 before making his features: Sebastiane (1975), Jubilee (1977) and The Tempest (1979). From 1980 he returned to painting (a show at the ICA) and design (The Rake's Progress with Ken Russell in Florence), and made the films Caravaggio (1986), The Last of England (1987), War Requiem (1988), The Garden (1990), Edward II (1991), Wittgenstein (1992) and Blue (1993). His books include: Dancing Ledge (1984), The Last of England (1987; now republished by Vintage under the title the author intended for it, Kicking the Pricks), Modern Nature (1991), At Your Own Risk (1992) and Chroma (1994). Derek Jarman died in February 1994.

Derek Jarman was one of our most celebrated artists- painter, poet, film-maker - and the author of many books, including the bestsellers Modern Nature and At Your Own Risk. 
 
The film scripts collected here for the first time- including Akenaten, Jubilee, Bob-Up-A-Down, B Movie: Little England/ A Time of Hope, Neutron and Sod 'Em - confirm Derek Jarman's reputation as a leading independent film-maker.

Derek Jarman

A Dungeness Notebook

'I planted a dog rose. Then I found a curious piece of driftwood and used this, and one of the necklaces of holey stones on the wall, to stake the rose. The garden had begun. I saw it as a therapy and a pharmacopoeia.' 
 
 In 1986 artist and filmmaker, Derek Jarman, bought Prospect Cottage, a Victorian fisherman's hut on the desert sands of Dungeness. It was to be a home and refuge for Jarman throughout his HIV diagnosis, and it would provide the stage for one of his most enduring, if transitory projects - his garden. Conceived of as a 'pharmacopoeia' - an ever-evolving circle of stones, plants and flotsam sculptures all built and grown in spite of the bracing winds and arid shingle - it remains today a site of fascination and wonder. 
 
Pharmacopoeia brings together the best of Derek Jarman's writing on nature, gardening and Prospect Cottage. Told through journal entries, poems and fragments of prose, it paints a portrait of Jarman's personal and artistic reliance on the space Dungeness offered him, and shows the cycle of the years spent there in one moving collage. 
 
'[Derek] made of this wee house, his wooden tent pitched in the wilderness, an artwork - and out of its shingle skirts, an ingenious garden - now internationally recognised. But, first and foremost, the cottage was always a living thing, a practical toolbox for his work' Tilda Swinton, from her Foreword

Pharmacopoeia

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