Books in the morning, 27 May 2020

A Zoom occasion yesterday evening, with wraith-like friends gathering in their homes, children and partners whisking past into a shadowy room. The backgrounds  are a study in themselves; one woman had chosen a video behind her of swirling Northern Lights, lifting her kindly face into a transcendental context. The comfort of books is another matter, steady and unblinking, not needing to be electrically charged and each page revealing a hidden text or picture when it is turned. Before the printing press books were very rare, so that a library might consist of twenty volumes. I once saw in the Coptic Museum in Cairo a small leather bound book of parchment that had been buried with a young woman of the fourth century as her most precious possession. It was the Gospel of John, written in beautiful rounded uncial forms of Greek. I hope the material and digital worlds can continue together.

Diana Wood Conroy 'Books in the morning', watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21 cm, 27 May, 2020.

Grey country, 26 May 2020

Two stories today came from university teachers in visual art who are overwhelmed with Zoom meetings and anxious students. The students do not turn on their video so that they appear as a black box on the screen. The intricate dynamics of face to face is lost, and sometimes the sound is blurred. For people used to 'hands on' teaching with materials the Zoom classes bring on a frustrated anger.  The landscape out the window and the Corinthian capital offers a retreat from human dificulty in mist and rain, with a heavy sea rumbling in the distance.The column capital is part of the archive of European forms that was brought here, seen in the porticos of banks and museums. Its stony spirals and curving acanthus leaves remember another kind of country. The archive of the Illawarra is held in earth and landforms, and oral stories; cloudy and diffuse to Anglo eyes. 

Diana Wood Conroy 'Grey Country', watercolour on Arches paper 15 x 21 cm, 26 May 2020

Winter has come, 25 May 2020

At the shops today I saw a camp bed set up in the shopping mall just near the highway, with bulky bags and folded blankets.  The hunched over person in the nearby cafe cradling a take-away coffee  may have belonged to the bed. The cold wind blew, a few people hurried past nearly empty shops looking at the ground.The little incense burner of rough unglazed terracotta was made in Cyprus recently by an aged woman potter who sat on a low stool over her hand-turned wheel making vessels that had not changed substantially for hundreds of years. Burning incense made from pungent herbs cleanses the air, and the strong clouds of scented smoke seem to lift the mind away from the present. The small container is not unlike the cluster of small pots made to hold many kinds of seeds as a sacrifice for the Temple of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis in Greece.The Mysteries held at the temple over three days inducted people into the central meaning of life, which you were not allowed to reveal on pain of death, once you had become an initiate. It remained secret for hundreds of years, but then in the early Christian era, someone broke faith and let it be known that the meaning of life was something to do with a grain of wheat.

Diana Wood Conroy 'Winter has come' watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21 cm, 25 May 2020.

Mountain with yellow cup, 24 May 2020

The sound of wind filled the house, and clouds streamed across the sky. Even with the wind the sea could be heard thumping on the shore; a rim of white is just visible. The mountain is Sublime Point, a peak in the Illawarra escarpment which is part of the Great Dividing Range. All the Dharrawal geographic names echo in the names we use, but the detail of the  huge antiquity of the land is hidden; you have to know how to look. Sometimes a beautiful edge ground axe is found near one of the tracks from beach into the hills. The Dharrawal people say the oral tradition remembers a time before the last ice age, 10,000 years ago, and that they still call from headlands to country buried under the sea since the rise of the waters. The coming of white people caused a vast pandemic of European diseases, much worse than Covid 19.

 Diana Wood Conroy, 'Mountain with yellow cup',  watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21 cm 24 May 2020

Petals on a cold day, 23 May 2020

The  stalk of tight lily buds open slowly, revealing an extraordinary architecture, stamens with their delicately balanced boomerangs of pollen around the triplle lobed stigma. The white feathers of the cockatoo and the froth and ripple of petal seem to be made of equally mysterious materials. Now that some of the Covid 19 restrictions are being lifted, the question of action about  the climate becomes more urgent. One definition of nature - the forested hills, the distant sea that contain bird and flower- is 'the inherent power or force by which the physical and mental activities of humans are sustained.' The Greek word ‘physis’, ‘nature’, comes from the verb ‘physein’ to be born; meaning according to Aristotle, that nature is the primary material element from which things that are born generate.  Climate change is a human dilemma. It is easy to forget the enigma of the bud opening and the arrival of the child. 

Diana Wood Conroy 'Petals on a cold day',watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21 c,  23 May 2020.