Derek Jarman (1942-1944)

Jarman's visual exploration of the dynamics between painting and the three-dimentional world is explored on a monumental scale with the present work. Cool Waters Series explodes into the viewer's space with the intriguing device of a towel rail. The use of such devices was a natural progression for Jarman in the late 60s, then an aspiring Slade graduate with an increasing interested in Pop and the three-dimensional. The present work relates to the larger canvas, Cool Waters which was part of the young Contemporaries at the Tate exhibition in 1967, the year in which Jarman won the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation Prize for Landscape with his largest ever composition which explored similar artistic concerns, Lanscape with Various Devices (see T.Peake, Derek Jarman, London, 1999, p.124).