Yellow cup with dark forest, 17 May 2020

Looking out at dawn, a flock of cockatoos perform above the the still dim and slumbering forest. The geography of hills and sea is their theatre. For humans our performance areas have diminished lately, and it's not so necessary to dress carefully and be fastidious about how one might appear. I have found some idiosyncratic garments that give me pleasure, a jacket of rough handwoven silk about thirty years old, some red trousers a gift from India, hand knitted rainbow socks, an ancient mohair cardigan knitted by my mother ten years ago. Colour is good for grandchildren to see you on Facetime. It reminds me of the pleasure of wearing the oldest assemblages when digging on a site, everyone clothed in their own choice of covered -up comfort, or delighting in the oddest T-shirts from Op shops. The heat and dust end up making every garment encrusted and related one to the other in a typology of shabbiness, all in the same style like costumes from a period drama. Perhaps in decades to come we will dentify a Covid 19 style, as distinctive as shoulder pads or big hair.

Diana Wood Conroy 'Yellow cup with dark forest', watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21 cm, 17 May 2020

Flowers and vessel, 16 May 2020

Every morning I check the garden for what might have happened - 8 mls of rain - some brilliant grevilleas out, feed the goldfish. Some friends went out for coffee but were disturbed at seeing small crowds of people close together and not distancing.   There's a dawning realisation of lasting difficulty for artists and scholars, and for people separated over continents and states. So concentrate on what can be put in order and remember all the gardens you have lived near, as various as houses. In the Northern Territory I once lived in a wooden-louvred house built for missionaries in 1932, set about with red crotons and coconut palms, with a long swing suspended from a vast mango tree. Rainbow bee-eater birds swung on the washing line. The most ancient garden I've seen is one in the Temple of Apollo Hylates in Cyprus, Apollo of the Woods, where there are circular beds once planted with herbs, possibly bay or myrtle. Nearby, a great marble basin for washing in, like the tiny simulacrum beneath the flowers in the painting. Gardens disappear once the gardeners have gone, but they live in the memory. 

Diana Wood Conroy, 'Flowers and vessel', watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21 cm, 16 May 2020

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.

Rose on my table looking north, 14 May 2020

Today was shopping in a big Woolworths, waiting in a lengthy queue behind a woman bent over with age and disability, who queried the price of everything so that the site manager had to be sent for. The girl at the check-out had a distinctive pre-Raphaelite face and was unflappably courteous and kind so that she made her work seem a noble task.  A work of love is what the rose stands for, the labyrinthine blossom of Aphrodite/Venus and the Virgin Mary. On Bathurst and Melville Islands north of Darwin the Virgin Mary arrived with Sacred Heart nuns, and there are statues of her put up on either side of the turbulent strait that divides the two islands. The Tiwi accepted her with some interest and hope, as another element in their pervasive world of spirits. She has also made the journey to Australia with more recent eastern Mediterranean settlers. Greek friends in Sydney once took me to the Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Strathfield to be near the miracle working icon of the Virgin of the Sorrowful and Afflicted. She must be very busy at the moment.

Diana Wood Conroy 'Rose on my table looking north', watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21 cm, 14 May 2020

Dawn with empty cup, 13 May 2020

It's getting colder, with whisps of smoke from hazard burning. There's still next summer's fire season to prepare for. The little figure from Pompei crouched as the ashes fell, and the shape of the body was preserved as an absence in the tufa as it solidified. I heard of two people retrenched today, one in construction, one in travel. The universities are in dire straits. But while walking around the garden this morning, absently pulling a few weeds, a Wanderer butterfly landed on my arm and remained, waving its black antennae, its body patterned with white spots on velvety black, closed wings petalled with orange. This alighting must be a rare chance, a sign to accept with wonder that there are unknown marvels out there.

Diana Wood Conroy 'Dawn with empty cup' watercolour on Arches paper 15 x 21 cm, 13 May 2020