The production designer Christopher Hobbs, who has died aged 82 following a chest infection, had the opportunity of expressing himself in films made by purveyors of the colourful and outrageous, such as the directors Derek Jarman and Ken Russell.
His tour de force, with Jarman, combining sexuality and art, was Caravaggio (1986), an imagined tale of a love triangle involving the real-life Italian Renaissance painter Michelangelo da Caravaggio woven together by his canvases in various stages of completion – painted by Hobbs himself.
More challenging was creating sets with a limited budget. An art dealer, Nicholas Ward-Jackson, presented Jarman with the idea of a film on the artist, but it was seven years before finance was available – by which time Hobbs had drawn a mass of storyboards, even though ideas of filming in Italy’s palaces had to be downscaled.
He and Jarman opted to recreate an “Italy of the mind”, from the 16th century up to the time of the post-second world war neorealist film masterpiece Bicycle Thieves. “After that, Italy becomes rather too communal and European, and less Italian,” said Hobbs.
A damp London East End warehouse was a substitute for Caravaggio’s Rome. Hobbs painted one rough concrete floor black and flooded it with water to give “shiny reflections” representing a palace’s marble. “The poor actors had to sit with their feet in the water!” he said.
The stripped-down sets combined with the film’s tapestry of vivid images, enhanced by the director of photography Gabriel Beristain’s lighting and Sandy Powell’s costume designs, to win Caravaggio the Silver Bear at the Berlin film festival and bring Jarman, regarded as an art-house director, wider recognition.
As well as designing the sets, Hobbs took responsibility for the props. Some, such as an electronic calculator and a clattering black typewriter used in the bath – his idea, replacing the quill pen and inkwell planned by Jarman – were not of the period, but added to the distinctive style.
His first film, as props designer, was Russell’s 1971 witchcraft drama The Devils, alongside Jarman, who was then cutting his teeth as a production designer. This led Jarman to call on Hobbs’s many artistic talents for his avant-garde short films, such as Garden of Luxor (1972), for which he sculpted masks (something he did for Russell’s much bigger production of the rock opera Tommy in 1975) and designed costumes.
Hobbs became one of Jarman’s regular collaborators, providing illustrations for the director’s debut feature film, Sebastiane (1976), reputedly the first homoerotic movie to get a general release in Britain, and as costume designer on Jubilee (1978), a dystopian satire transporting Elizabeth I 400 years forward to the realities of a punk London where authority has broken down at the time of royal celebrations.
After Caravaggio, Hobbs worked as production designer on three more Jarman feature films. The Last of England (1987), made after the director was diagnosed HIV-positive, was a scathing attack on what Jarman saw as cultural decline in Thatcherite Britain. It was followed by The Garden (1990), an allegory of homopohobia in the wake of the Aids epidemic, and Edward II (1991), Christopher Marlowe’s Elizabethan drama transposed to the 20th century, which saw a return to minimalist sets of stone walls and dirt floors, and objects such as a Christmas tree and a personal stereo littered around.
With Russell, whose films were equally colourful and provocative, but not so angry, Hobbs worked alongside Jarman as a designer on Savage Messiah (1972), a biopic of the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, before taking charge of production design on Gothic (1986). This horror take on Percy and Mary Shelley’s 1816 visit to Lord Byron in Geneva gave him the splendour of a Palladian mansion, Wrotham Park in Hertfordshire, to work with.
He then designed the gaudy set for Salome’s Last Dance (1988), a typically outlandish Russell tale imagining Oscar Wilde’s banned play being performed in a candlelit Victorian brothel.
With Terence Davies, Hobbs then took his Caravaggio “history as remembered” philosophy to The Long Day Closes (1992), an evocation of the director’s Liverpool childhood that was happier than his earlier film, Distant Voices, Still Lives. Failing to find contemporary archive photographs of the street he grew up in, Hobbs recreated it from Davies’s memory, but exaggerated elements. “The road heaves and dips so puddles will collect, the railings writhe, drainpipes are intentionally warped, rust is as thick as cornflakes,” he explained.
When he worked on Dennis Potter’s final TV drama, Cold Lazarus (1996), the Independent praised him for creating a “gorgeous, retro-decadent future”.
Hobbs then took his talents to the glam-rock musical thriller Velvet Goldmine (1998), realising the garishness of the era, and Mansfield Park (1999), returning to a spare look, exchanging traditional period interiors for chalk-white walls and parquet floors.
His final screen work, the BBC television serial Gormenghast (2000), for which he created more than 100 sets, brought him the Royal Television Society’s best production design award. “It’s impossible not to admire the stunning visual imagination of Christopher Hobbs,” wrote the critic Steve Grant.
Hobbs was born in Chatham, Kent, to Sheila (nee Hickman) and John Hobbs, an RAF squadron leader who eventually became British air attache in Washington DC. After attending schools in Montgomery, Alabama, and Washington, he studied art at the Slade school in London.
Through his life, he contributed murals to Omani palaces, garden features to a Spanish castle and mosaics to Westminster cathedral. He was also at one time custodian of Plas Teg, a Jacobean mansion in Flintshire, and helped to restore a crumbling ruin, the Menagerie at Horton House, near Northampton.
In 2005, Hobbs moved to Burgundy, where he bought and restored a farmhouse.
A mask and shield designed by him are among the Caravaggio film collection held at the V&A.
• Christopher John Hobbs, artist and production designer, born 15 June 1941; died 13 January 2024
