Here’s a conversation, recorded at the Diablito Pizzeria in Palma on 18 March 2017, about two of Patrick’s drawings and how he drew one and acquired the other.

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JP: So tell me about the drawing you did and the other drawing.

PM: You read the part about Howard van Hyning in Brooklyn told me he had a neighbor with a house for sale.

JP: You said your entire pension check went to that house.

PM: Yeah. Let’s see.

The widow of the painter that lived in that house was a neighbor in Brooklyn so I went there and gave her the money. She showed me a photograph about that big [maybe 3 x 5 in] of the house, black and white. There was a round door, a couple of windows and a tile roof, and it looked good. So we bought it for $4000. When we got there, the painter John von Wicht had left a roll of paintings in one corner with the leaching[?] on them and we saved those paintings. Later we sold them to the Brooklyn Museum, which has a collection of his work. There were a few other odds and ends in the house, like that drawing of a mule pulling a cart with the dead guy on the back, on the back of the cart, on his back. That was a birthday present from the painter, whose name I can’t remember, who’s a friend of the previous owner of the house, John von Wicht, for her birthday. What was the wife’s name? I forget. Somehow I kept that all these years, I don’t know why.

Anyway, I always liked that drawing and then, I don’t know, I was doing a lot of line drawings at the time. Trying to put down the pen and keep it going until I finished the drawing. It was one of those. The others, I don’t know what happened to them. A bunch of them I did on glass and painted. Pieces of glass about that big, on the side of the glass you paint on doesn’t look too good, but you turn it around and it’s okay. I had six of those that I managed to keep until I met Stephanie. Somehow it happened that she stepped on them and broke them all. Maybe it was because it was part of the past that she didn’t want to know about unconsciously she was getting rid of things… I don’t know.

One of the drawings I did was of our neighbor whose name won’t come to me right now. He used to beat his mule while plowing the land below our house. He was also well known in the village for beating his wife, who lost half of her hair because he put her head in the oven. That’s the first neighbor I knew anything about in Galilea. This drawing was sort of based on him: cigarette hanging out of his mouth, with a smashed hat, a bad guy.