How Dark My Love is a Portrait of Devotion, Art, and the Beautifully Unruly Life of Joe Coleman
Scott Gracheff’s How Dark My Love is, on its surface, a documentary about the legendary painter Joe Coleman — the meticulous chronicler of the macabre whose work hovers between the grotesque and the mythical. But what the film ultimately reveals is something gentler, stranger, and far more affecting: a love story. Beneath the gothic density of Coleman’s canvases lies a partnership defined by unwavering devotion, creative friction, and the hard-earned intimacy of two people who choose each other every day. Much of the film centres around Coleman’s years-long process of painting a life-size portrait of Ward — a monumental act of devotion that becomes the emotional backbone of the documentary.
Gracheff follows Coleman and his wife Whitney Ward with the kind of observational stillness that lets their relationship breathe on screen. Coleman, ever the obsessive craftsman, paints with a precision that takes him years to finish a singular piece. Ward, a performer and dominatrix, stands beside him as both muse and anchor who understands his artistic compulsions even as she challenges the ways they collide with her own inner life. One of the film’s most arresting sequences captures a moment of tension between them: Ward questioning how certain personal experiences may be transformed in Coleman’s work and how audiences might perceive them. It’s a subtle exchange, but an essential one. It reminds us that even in a partnership as mythologized as theirs, they are still human beings negotiating boundaries, tenderness, and truth.
The documentary also offers a vivid look into Coleman’s decades-long career and the constellation of cultural icons drawn to his vision: Johnny Depp, Iggy Pop, Dave Navarro, GG Allin, and others who appear with admiration and respect towards the artist’s work. Coleman’s work is not simply dark for darkness’ sake, but a lifelong attempt to catalog existence in its most intricate, uncomfortable, and ecstatic forms.
Legacy hovers constantly in the background, especially in Ward’s candid reflections. When she quietly remarks, “I guess I can die now,” after Coleman completes her portrait, it lands as both a joke and a sigh of relief. This is what it means to be loved by an artist who documents entire lives in paint: to be preserved, interpreted, and immortalized, even while still living. And even more so, the art becomes a signature of re-birth for Coleman and Ward, as the painting — that the couple refers to as their child — is swept away to a gallery exhibition that results in a period of mourning for them.
The film also has lighter, unexpected moments of humour, including a cameo from Fred Armisen. In a Q&A after the screening, Gracheff shared a deleted story in which Armisen, always starstruck and eager, fulfilled Coleman’s joking request for fancy cheeses and wine at dinner.
Ultimately, How Dark My Love positions Joe Coleman not just as a painter of documentary art, but as someone whose life is its own ongoing document with a body of work that influences so many areas of popular culture. Gracheff captures Coleman and Ward’s relationship and community they are immersed in with clarity and compassion. The result is a portrait of two people navigating art, darkness, and devotion in equal measure. It is, unexpectedly and unmistakably, a love story.
