Blue

Derek Jarman (1942–1994) was an English artist, filmmaker, set designer, diarist, author, and gardener. After attending King's College London and the Slade School of Art, he began a career as a painter. As a set designer, he worked on such productions as The Royal Ballet’s Jazz Calendar (1968) and The English National Opera’s production of Don Giovanni (1968), as well as a number of films. In the early 1970s, Jarman began a series of filmworks made with Super 8, followed by his first full-length feature film, Sebastiane, in 1975. He went on to make ten more feature films, among them the famous experimental Caravaggio (1986) and The Garden (1990). His final feature, Blue, was first shown at the Biennale Arte, Venice, in June 1993, seven months before his death.

Michael Charlesworth is a professor of art history at the University of Texas at Austin, teaching nineteenth-century European painting and photography. Specializing in interdisciplinary approaches, he has in recent years written the first full-length study of Reginald Farrer, the early twentieth-century plant collector, gardener, writer, watercolor painter, and Buddhist, and a critical life of Derek Jarman. He has published articles on early photography, the picturesque, and eighteenth-century panoramic drawing, as well as scholarly articles on the gardens of Stourhead, Rievaulx Terrace, and Wentworth Castle. His interdisciplinary study Landscape and Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France was published in 2008. Over the past two years, Charlesworth has been writing a second book project about Derek Jarman while living in a small wooden house in Austin, Texas, built in 1917, with a small garden around it.

Dedicated to publishing rare, out-of-print, and newly commissioned texts as accessible paperback volumes the ekphrasis series is part of David Zwirner Books’s ongoing effort to publish new and surprising pieces of writing on visual culture.

Read more