Flowers with an incense burner, 21 April 2020.

Today I left the house for the first time in weeks, to get a flu injection. It was quite exciting to go out, and even to consider what to wear. A clinic had been set up in the back garden of the surgery with chairs placed two metres apart as if for a performance.  I found a former colleague there, a biological scientist and inventor, who said "I was about to travel when the lock down happened, on leave for the first time in years, and at first I was furious, but now I just ferociously garden."

The circular many-petalled flower is the basis of the rosette, a foundation motif for pattern, especially in ancient vase-painting and mosaics. Rosettes cluster to form larger patterns in optical waves, with shimmering grids, chequers and scale or feather patterns in a graduated measure. Some scholars suggest that in times of uncertain and fluctuating security Roman societies found a particular pleasure in these optical patterns.  It follows that the impulse to be with flowers is what people have always done. And venerate them with a bit of incense.

Diana Wood Conroy "Flowers with an incense burner' watercolour on Arches paper 15 x 21 cm, 21 April 2020