Robin Mason

I finished this small study, thinking of my parents and their quiet, steadfast love as I continue to wrestle with the ache of losing them many years ago, and the unexpected joy of finding them again in the archive of their letters.

 

In these fragile papers, sadness and happiness drift together, suspended like the envelopes in the painting, hovering between presence and absence, memory and imagination.

 

Among the family letters linked to Bryn Myrddin are those exchanged between the Boy with the Monkey (my father) and his childhood friend, the girl who would become my mother.


 

Their words move gently from friendship into an early, tentative romance, revealing the intimacy we rarely allow ourselves to imagine in our parents, the tenderness they once lived so openly, before time rearranged them into the roles we later knew.

 

One letter ends with a lipstick kiss, a small, luminous imprint pressed across decades. It holds both warmth and a quiet heartbreak, reminding me that love, too, was an anchor during the war, binding two young lives across distance and fear:

 

“…I love you darling. All my fondest love, Joan XXX a nice big kiss for you xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx…”

 

Viewed through an archival lens, these letters are no longer simple mementoes. They are charged objects — carriers of latent emotional energy, holding the vibrations of hands that once folded them, breath that once dried the ink, hope that once sealed the envelope. They record tenderness under pressure, documenting how intimacy survives — not despite uncertainty, but within it.

 

And in this quiet residue of the archive — in these imperfect, improvised, enduring exchanges — I search for imagery that uses that language of love.