Click here to listen to a recording of poet and novelist Michael Rosen reading an extract from his book 'Many Different Kinds of Love: A story of life, death and the NHS, (2021), which recounts his convalescence from COVID-19 and the sense he had, while in an induced coma, of the threshold of his body.

Following the reading is another audio recording of a conversation between the artist and co-curator Alice Acland on the artist’s relationship to his wife Judith and on the making of this painting.

This painting is a portrait of the artist Timothy Hyman’s wife, Judith, as she lies in a hospital bed, her face divided by an intravenous drip that runs vertically across the paper. The painting itself also reveals a split between the interior view of a hospital room and the outside world seen through a large window. It delineates the contrast between spaces that are associated with health and those that revolve around a condition of sickness. Hyman appears to capture his wife somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness, sickness and health, occupying a state of transition. 

Conversation: Timothy Hyman and Alice Acland by Courtauld MA Curating the Art Museum

Michael Rosen reading an extract from his book 'Many Different Kinds of Love' by Courtauld MA Curating the Art Museum

My name is Michael Rosen, and this is an extract from my book Many Different Kinds of Love, recorded to accompany Timothy Hyman’s painting, Judith In Hospital, for the Courtauld’s MA Curating the Arts Museum exhibition, Both Sides of Here.

at university we talked about how portals 

in fantasy stories are ‘liminal’, a space or moment ‘in between worlds’

 or on the edge of one world but not quite in another, 

 or it can be a moment of anxiety or danger: 

Or sitting in the waiting area at an airport. 

I think of a train journey to a summer camping 

I start to believe the edges of my body are liminal, 

sheets, blankets, the bed, the ‘fence’ on the side of the bed, the pillows 

and it is all this that stops me sleeping: 

It feels like I’ve found myself something that’s not on an edge 

Courtauld MA Interview Timothy Hyman transcript

Alice Acland: Could you tell us about this painting?

Timothy Hyman: Yes. We were both people who married relatively late, we had lived our twenties in a way that we wouldn't want to live. I mean, for many people, the twenties aren't necessarily the happiest time. And, neither of us had found the right partner or anything like it. So, meeting was rather a miracle, we married quite rapidly. I was very lucky, I had a cheap rent in Soho and, quite soon, it became clear that fibroids were going to need serious action. In fact, she'd had a hysterectomy, so that ruled out children, unless we adopted, which we weren't really in a position to do. So, that was Soho Women’s Hospital, which is a very interesting place. It's still there, but it isn’t used really. It’s very good, actually. It was a warm hospital; it didn't have a sort of various institutional feel to it. I would go in and visit her, but it was pretty serious [having] hysterectomy in those days. And, she was obviously spending a lot of time on the drip, sleeping. She wasn't going to die, but nevertheless, you know, [it was] the first time I'd really witnessed someone I loved in extremis. So that's what it's about. Plus, I, to this day, [am] very interested in the way that the landmarks do their dance across London and unexpected things are seen from unexpected ways. So, the post office tower was still relatively unfamiliar. And it looked different from Soho Women’s Hospital, so that comes into it too. Both of us are Londoners. 

AA: Many of your paintings have these sorts of assemblages of the city. Would it be right to say that they're drawn from memory?

TH : I mean, I do draw in the streets and I believe in drawing this feature and I try and get other people to draw in the street. 

AA: We were struck by how much of the painting is of Judith in the hospital bed, but it's the big, expansive window looking out on the square -

AA: - and the kind of symbolic comfort of those spaces as well. Also, the very visible threshold: the window acting between the space of a hospital, which is a space of health and illness, and then the outside world. 

TH: I think it's about thirty-seven years ago. I was still at a relatively early stage, it almost felt like a transgression to put oneself within the space, but I felt I had to, and I certainly wasn't expecting it to go red, as it were.

AA: Do you use that profile of yourself into many other of your paintings? 

TH: Yes, I do. Well, I mean, each time it's in a way I'm reluctant to do, but the only way I can get the space to wrap around, it has to wrap around something: it just looks vacant to me, if I don't. 

AA: Do you see your work as a way to explore your different selves, or would you not place it or place that kind of meaning on your work? 

TH: Well, the problem of making a painting and then standing back from it and seeing what you've done 10 years later, is quite different really. But maybe there's something of that. 

AA: Do you think you look at Judith in Hospital, the painting, differently now?

TH: The only thing I had to hang on in a way was a little drawing I had done of the way that the cord of the drip sliced through her face. That was really the starting point, and from that one could, as it were, move outwards. So, I didn't know where I was going, and that's one of the things I liked about working on paper, that one didn't have the stretcher to contend with. 

AA: What does Judith think of you painting her? 

TH: I think, the whole the thing is that she just tries not to worry about the question. She regards it as something other than herself, my representation is not the same thing as her. So, there isn't a conflict. 

Judith in Hospital, 1986

Timothy Hyman (b. 1946)

'Many Different Kinds of Love' by Michael Rosen, illustrated by Chris Riddell, is published by Ebury Press © 2021, Michael Rosen