Flowers on a grey day, 27 April 2020

A child wails next door on the still day, the sky like a corrugated roof.  Like blossoms suddenly opening, when a new child arrives in the family there is rapturous delight. But today an indefinable malaise descends so that when I see the children waving at me on my phone, but breaking up into pixels on the screen, I have a stab of fear as if this foreshadows a fractured future. But the children themselves laugh and  overcome any worries by showing me paintings with great slabs of colour, a flame of red, a wall of yellow, a dome of blue on big sheets of paper. It's a wonder for me too to take a brush to wet paper so that it flairs with colours like viridian, alizarin, vermilion or ultramarine. The mark of the hand is as mysterious as alchemy.

Diana Wood Conroy 'Flowers on a grey day', watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21 cm, 27 April 2020.