Derek Jarman: A Biography

7. Every Man Is a Special Kind of Artist

7 Every Man is a Special Kind of Artist A spry figure with a distinctive goatee and a shock of unruly hair, Robin Noscoe had been in charge of art at Canford for some five years when Jarman arrived at the school. A silversmith, potter, furniture -maker, painter and keen student of architecture, Noscoe did not value one sphere of artistic activity over another, nor did he pretend that as the teacher he had all the answers. As humble as he was eclectic, he allowed his pupils to follow their own enthusiasms and carry him with them when appropriate. In his own words, he often found himself being ‘pushed from behind’ rather than ‘leading by the nose’. He was the proud owner of a vintage open-topped Rolls–Royce called Percy, which he had partly – and rather eccentrically – built himself. Hand on horn, Noscoe would bowl along the country lanes in Percy, broadening the aesthetic horizons of his charges by taking them to the Stanley Spencer Chapel at Burghclere, nearby Montacute House, Longleat, Oxford, Salisbury, or Bath. He also haunted the bombsites of Poole where, with the help of his pupils, he scavenged for doors, windows and floorboards to use in the house he was building for himself on the outskirts of nearby Wimborne Minster. Noscoe’s profound influence on Jarman is evidenced in almost every sphere of Jarman’s work as an adult artist: in the fluid way in which he would move between disciplines – painting, collage, design, film; in his appreciation of things architectural; in his wideranging and improvisatory use of found objects; in his tendency to emphasise and favour the practical rather than the theoretical nature of art; in his instinctive questioning of authority; in the sheer, almost childish delight he took in his work. Usually, when discussing the major influences on Jarman’s art, critics and historians cite William Morris, Nash, Rauschenberg, Schwitters, Warhol, to name but some of the most obvious. Noscoe predates them all. Equally influential was the location of the shack where Noscoe ran his extracurricular classes. The adult Jarman would almost always operate on the fringe. As a painter he hardly ever exhibited in a West End gallery. As a film-maker he eschewed mainstream cinema. As a sexual being he embraced his position on the margins of conventional society. When, towards the end of his life, he came to buy his first house, he chose a cottage on an isolated shingle spit at the far end of Romney Marsh. In the context of Canford, the art shack was similarly at one remove from the centre of the school; a universe unto itself. Standing on the furthest edge of the overgrown park, the shack was a ramshackle building, riddled with neglect. A brick base supported wooden slatted walls. There were extensive windows on three sides. The fourth wall backed on to the fives court, which supported the entire structure. Inside there was an ‘old coke stove, broken and comfortable furniture, books and drawers full of postcards’.1 Above the windows ran a frieze which read: AN ARTIST IS NOT A SPECIAL KIND OF MAN, BUT EVERY MAN IS A SPECIAL KIND OF ARTIST. The words are Eric Gill’s. They could have been Jarman’s. Perhaps, by the end of his schooldays, he imagined they were. He certainly made the art shack his own, the very centre of his schoolboy life; an absolute ‘defence against an everyday existence that was awry’.2 56 Derek Jarman Jarman began visiting the shack in his first year, often in the company of Jonathan Ionides, then a constant companion. Although, as a new boy, he was still uncharacteristically and painfully shy – ‘palefaced , quiet and lost’3 – and although it would be a while before he would make his mark in this new-found haven, after a mere two terms at Canford Shorland-Ball would grudgingly report: ‘Rugger does not seem much up his street, but he has spent profitable hours in the Art Room.’ In the spring term of 1956, the art shack underwent an expansion. It acquired a pottery wheel, plus a lean-to shed to house it. Jarman took immediate advantage of this, moving Noscoe to report: ‘some of his clay models are most lively and interesting’. He was also starting to paint, and to paint furiously: landscapes primarily, but also selfportraits and still lifes, works which were variously figurative, impressionistic, cubist...