PRESENTING CONRAD

Conrad writing to poet, Dale A. Edmands

"I have always been one of the obsessed. From birth. I could stare at the head of a pin for a million years. I am subject to crushes, obsessions, fetishes. Each time I fell madly in love, the object of my passion was never available. Delay was my closest lover. Yet Lucidity came to me. I learnt to work with suffering, ruthlessly applying it. I worked with the bloody tangle, unwinding the cords that threatened to strangle, working like a mad silk worm, year after year... In darkness, in blinding light light, I studied the somber jewel of sorrow. Stumbling upon secret seams of joy, I found a type of balance. Working like a medium, I called up many influences, sorting them blindly, perceptively. This is the way with creative people - they are born with an excess of mental energy. If not used properly it rots. In this way one must be careful with obsession. One must work with it... the energy must be conducted... and one must learn how to do this, otherwise it turns back on the creator causing stagnation and torment..." 

The art of Christina Conrad, and indeed her life, is a distinct and marvellous phenomenon. Her vision seems just as surprising to me now as when I first met her in 1970. It has always seemed to me that she embodies the integrity of an outsider scorning the hurried directions of modern pretence and emptiness. Christina is not a part of the cynicism or dehumanisation that often unbalances art and makes of it a pathetic amusement.  -  Nigel Brown

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