Nasturtium with palmette, 6 May 2020

Brilliant flowers against the distant sea,  to counteract the anxiety of seeing people on the news who have lost their businesses - a woman whose cafe struggled over the stifling smoky summer, and then was hit by Covid 19. She had to let all her staff go, and has lost everything she worked for.  UNHCR sends desperate letters about the virus in refugee communities. But it is humbling that international students left stranded in Australia are being fed by volunteers in the Hindu and Sikh communities. Flowers are transient and yet always there, always one pop-up nasturtium to be found like the brilliant red flower painted in the fourth century tom in Cyprus that had existed in total darkness until the tomb was ruptured by machinery. A flower, a bird, a pomegranate to accompany the dead gives assurance of the abundant font of life. About the same time,  Augustine, at the end of his book ‘The City of God’ observed that death was all around him as the Gauls moved in on his city. Despite the imminent destruction of his house he wrote of the consolation  of the sea, 'as it slips on and off its many colours like robes… shades of green, now purple, now sky blue.'

Diana Wood Conroy 'Nasturtium with palmette', watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21 cm, 6 May 2020.