Sunflower with cockatoo, 15 May 2020

A grey cold day with prevailing news of economic woe from the virus is lit up by the radiant sunflower. Even though today ten people can go to a cafe, some friends have mentioned that they are anxious about leaving home and have become settled into a hermit crab pattern, hiding at home. It's my artist friends who are in a bad way, especially the older ones who have never managed to buy their own homes or save for their later years because of a lifetime of casual work. The model of the Delphic navel stone, originally a metre high and twined with carded wool, crept in beside the sunflower. Strangely, flowers and navels do have a relationship in antiquity, as both can be offerings to deities. The king Nikokles of Paphos founded Nea Paphos in the fourth century BC, just before the construction of the  Hellenistic theatre that is being excavated by the Australians. He described himself as a ‘priest of Anassa’ and one of his coins has a head of Aphrodite, crowned with flowers, and on the reverse, Apollo seated on a netted omphalos. The grounded things of place, deeply known, echo and reverberate in the psyche, giving comfort.

Diana Wood Conroy, 'Sunflower with cockatoo', watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21 cm, 15 May 2020.