At one point in “How Dark My Love,” Iggy Pop recalls how he bought a Joe Coleman painting to put up in his living room, along with a few other works of art and he realized he didn’t need a television anymore. By then in Scott Gracheff’s utterly fascinating profile of the underground artist, it’s understandable how that could be all you need for even the most overstimulated of audiences when Coleman’s paintings are explosions of information, portraits that not only vividly depict individuals in vibrant colors, but oftentimes will surround them with scenes from their life, important things they said or made an impression on them to the best of his knowledge and flood the frame with people they crossed paths with, all painted with as much attention as the central subject if considerably smaller overall. Gracheff offers up as stirring a summation of Coleman’s life by tracking him over the better part of a decade, devoting himself entirely to a painting of his longtime partner Whitney Ward and revealing much about himself in how he sees her.
“As with every portrait of his, it’s a self-portrait,” Ward says as she faces a predominantly blank canvas near the start of “How Dark My Love,” amused that all that’s been painted so far is her rack. The two have a healthy – and dark – sense of humor and live in separate apartments in New York since Ward has kept up a dominatrix business as she pursued photography and Coleman’s work is naturally solitary, but the two have as pure a connection as they come as societal misfits that completely accept one another. Survivors themselves of the grungy 1980s in New York, they can be seen as keepers of the flame of more transgressive times as they hold events around burlesque and the macabre since Coleman has a history of painting serial killers with the hope of understanding them better. No less than infamous Screw editor Al Goldstein can be heard lovingly call Coleman “despicable and vile” in introducing him for an interview, but even after the film digs up video of him biting off a rat’s head during his time in the punk scene, it’s hard not to fall hopelessly in love as Ward has when he invests himself so fully into every brushstroke to do her justice on the door-tall canvas, filling in the corners with memories of her late beloved mother, her reluctantly supportive conservative father and hanging out with G.G. Allin in his final days.
There’s some mild drama in the amount of time it takes Coleman to complete the painting or really any other when he insists on doing one portrait at a time, subsisting primarily on the income of his last effort over many years, but “How Dark My Love” has too much other intrigue going on simply by relaying the details of Ward and Coleman’s lives to require much more of a narrative. Gracheff and editor Tyler Hubby piece together the past and present as a mosaic not unlike Coleman does himself in his paintings to present a life in full, with the film becoming particularly breathtaking when Gracheff has the footage to reference a moment that Coleman has painted to allow comparison. However, in lavishing the same kind of attention to all aspects of Coleman and Ward’s lives as the painter would, the film expresses what Coleman has actually accomplished by seeing his subjects in all their dimension, with so many defined by their worst behavior and capturing them as far more complex. As he makes progress on the portrait of Ward, she can’t help but sneak a peek at one point and say, “It’s hard to look at it and think this is my life” with a mix of admiration and melancholy, adding with a tinge of uncertainty, “It looks like so much fun.” In “How Dark My Love,” there’s no doubt that it is, but at the same time, it’s understood to be more complicated than that.
“How Dark Was My Love” will screen again at the Tribeca Festival at the Village East on June 11th at 5:45 pm and AMC 19th St. East 6 on June 12th at 3 pm, June 13th at 9:15 pm and June 15th at 8:15 pm.