Christina and Patrick - journey between two worlds

"I did not show my paintings to anyone. From the age of twenty-six until I was nearly forty, I hid them in cupboards instead of food."

In 1952, Barbara Hepworth wrote to Patrick Hayman: "There are so many of your paintings which I would love to have...". The painter, Peter Lanyon, wrote: "I admire Pat’s courage that he believed his work will prove to be embracing... the most secret moments of our being."

"It is important," Hayman said, "to enter a world other than the visible one." Most of the art and literature he cared for was rooted in the transcendental, in extra-terrestrial myth. "In symbolism," he said, "the boat or the voyager can mean the journey between one world and another. In fact, in all legends, the ‘night crossing’ means such."

"I stood at the airport. My plaits were dying silk worms. My father hovered, unfit for worldly affairs, bound in the still egg of a dream. In his long gabardine coat. His curls straggling on his collar. His smooth, olive face blurry and secretive. His mouth opulent. His gentle eyes bespectacled. He was frightened when he saw me, cleaving to the wall as if he wanted to escape. He had run from me all these years. We drove away in a black taxi.

"The tall, dark house was full of his paintings. I brought some of my paintings to show him. In a head-on collision we recognized each other’s queerly mapped territory. We wanted each other. Yet we rejected each other violently, each one aghast at the other’s likeness, each one turning away from the love offered."

Read the poetry of Christina Conrad HERE


NOTE: The previous article calls attention to the power of poetry to enliven and guide all forms of human expression - whether it be drama, fiction, non-fiction, or - as in this case - biographical documentary. Readers interested in exploring the full possibilities of poetic expression are urged to read James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and my own, Sixteen Words for Water.

- Billy Marshall Stoneking