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.

First camellia, 6 April 2020

The first deep pinky-red flower opened on the big old camellia bush given to me by my sister as a tiny seedling. The profusely blossoming tree is a 'working woman's flower' not needing much attention when my days were consumed by university teaching. And no matter what the state of the world the soft petals return, soft as the skin of my little grandaughter whom I cannot see or hold. 

A radiant pure red was considered in ancient times to be the colour of light itself, before the notion of prismatic white light or the mixing of colours was understood. Plato defined colour, influenced by Empedocles, as “effluences from the surfaces of objects fitted into the channels of sight in the eye by the process of perception”. In the Roman frescoes I wonder at in Cyprus, red flowers were showered over processions, and found their way into ceilings and tombs.

Diana Wood Conroy, 'First camellia', watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21 cm, 6 April 2020

Pink cloud and cockatoos at the table, 5 April 2020

Looking out at a pink cloud at dawn, the hills of the escarpment are like the raking seats of a theatre around the performance area of the sea.  I'm looking at a Byzantine calendar and seeing that today is the Sunday of St Mary of Egypt who, after an encounter with the Virgin Mary redeemed her life of debauchery by wandering in the deserts of Egypt for decades, living on plants, and gradually becoming naked as her clothes wore away. She is described as baked dark brown by the sun with white hair and living entirely alone.  The birds watch the figurine of the crouching person from Pompei who may have felt at fault for the explosion of the volcano. In that era the ways of deities and humans were quite entangled.

Diana Wood Conroy, Pink cloud and cockatoos at the table, Watercolour on Arches paper 15 x 21 cm,April 5 2020

Flowers with a spindle whorl and aryballos, April 4 2020

The brilliant red geraniums seem appropriate  beside the spindle and its whorl, as though the petals might be spun into a red thread to find a way out of this labyrinth we are in. The spindle was given to me many years ago by Marousia a woman in the village of Menites in Andros, an island in the Cyclades in Greece. I was part of the University of Sydney team at the excavation of Zagora, a wild inaccessible site on a headland. The spindle is worn, and made of olive wood and I learnt to spin on it with the hairy local wool.

Thinking about slowness: to weave a square metre of cloth required about two kilometres of thread which would take about forty-five hours to spin. And then there was the weaving. On the little aryballos or perfume vessel you can just see a girl standing at a vertical loom.

Diana Wood Conroy, 'Flowers with spindle whorl and aryballos', watercolour on Arches paper 15 x 21 cm, 4 April 2020

The stage is set: cup with painted fish, April 3 2020

We are all in retreat, each house a little monastery along the street. People walk past each other as they go in opposite directions exercising up and down the road and call out "Are you alright?" "Yes, I'm OK are you?" The objects on my table perform memories - a little model of a theatre bought from a hawker beside the road in Ephesus in Turkey; a replica in resin of a Cycladic bowl once carved of stone, and a netted porcelain cup with the golden skeleton of a fish by Henrietta Farrelly-Barnett bought recently in Canberra.  But I grieve the unravelling of ordinary life, the great silence of gathering places without people, almost archaeological.

A lament from Euripides' Iphigeneia in Taurus: ' kingfisher, you who sing a sad song round the rocky headlands of the sea... I, a wingless bird compete with you in lamentation as I long for the market-places of the Greeks..'

Diana Wood Conroy 'The stage is set: cup with painted fish' watercolour on Arches paper 15 x 21cm, 3 April 2020.