How Dark My Love (dir. Scott Gracheff)

By: Adam Freed

The art of Joe Coleman is far from conventional.  The sixty-nine year old New Yorker’s artistic realm exists mostly in the pitch black world of the macabre, featuring gruesome explorations of serial killers, satanists and a marching militia of society's miscreants. Art and truth are both in the eye of the beholder, and as a result, the controversial painter makes for a fascinating case study in director Scott Gracheff’s feature documentary How Dark My Love.  Coleman, a former New York City cab driver and heroin addict has never had a fear of the darker side of life.  Having experienced his fair share of trauma, the performance art enthusiast has made it his life’s work to embrace, rather than to abhor many of the oddities that social mores would deem reprehensible. His wife, Whitney, takes center stage as the master artist spends the lion’s share of four years attempting to paint a seven foot canvas mural of her, that includes all of the influences, impacts and pitfalls of her life. Joe Coleman  paintings look and read far more like a biography than they do a portrait, which makes the sale of such works to be a far more difficult task than one may imagine.

Make no mistake, Coleman’s gothic and diverse paintings adorn the collections of an impressive list of celebrities including, Iggy Pop, Leonardo DiCaprio and Johnny Depp, but they are an acquired taste to say the least.  Doubling as a life’s retrospective, Scott Gracheff’s documentary unearths many of Coleman’s vulnerabilities, especially those of a financial nature, rooted in the artist’s painstakingly meticulous process of creation that results in some projects, like his exploration of his wife Whitney taking years to complete.  With so much time elapsing between sales, it proves, as times, quite difficult for Coleman to stay afloat without dipping into the savings he has bolstered with years of art showcase sales.  Although How Dark My Love overstays its necessary welcome by at least a quarter hour, it is a fascinating story to say the least. Littered with nudity, acts of sexual exploration, and bodily mutilation, Gracheff’s film, and Coleman’s art are certainly not for the faint of heart.  There is something celebratory in the nature of Joe Coleman’s dedication to his wife that makes the morbidity of his art feel almost secondary.  How Dark My Love is not so much the story of a controversial artist as it is a love story about the fact that an artist existing at the outer limits of society’s acceptance seems to have found his perfect match in a lovely woman who embraces Coleman for who he is, and never for one second attempt to mold him into any other kind of monster.  In that sense, How Dark My Love is a documentary that works aspirationally just as much as it does an artistic exploration of a man that many in the art world shunned in the name of poor taste.

Target Score 6.5/10 - Fascinating and grotesque are words that have often been used to describe the unique stylings of painter Joe Coleman.  How Dark My Love is an effective exploration of Coleman’s life as he attempts to create his masterwork, a seven foot autobiographical portrait of his doting wife Whitney. 

How Dark My Love is included in Movie Archer's coverage of the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival.