Table with Corinthian column and Woonona coastline, 7 April 2020

Everyone is gardening, the air this morning full of sounds of lawnmowers, whipper-snippers and even a chainsaw. And voices, people calling over fences, or talking as they jog down the road, widely spaced. A friend told me she went into her neglected garden and quite viciously pruned a bush, surprised at herself. People being at home is like my childhood, when few owned cars. It's hard to buy a live hen in the Illawarra, there is such demand.

The convoluted form of the Corinthian column has a story, told by Vitruvius. The sculptor and architect Callimachus passed by the grave of a young Corinthian girl. On it her nurse had  placed  a basket of her loved objects, and around the basket had sprouted the curling leaves of the acanthus, a plant commonly used for funerals. The beautiful fragments of Corinthian capitals found in Cyprus are like stony gardens, tendrils curving and twining in rememberance of all the young ones lost.  

Diana Wood Conroy 'Table with Corinthian column and Woonona coastline', watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21cm, 7 April 2020.