Moon and omphalos 7 May 2020

The certainty of the phases of the moon provides predictability. And the omphalos from Delphi, or navel stone, is about being centred and localised. There are many ways of regarding lunar patterns apart from European customary ones. For the Tiwi in northern Australia the moon is a man who gradually withers away to a bit of skinny bone in the sky and then grows big again. He is associated with death and the waxing and waning of spirits, while the sun is a woman, huge and glowing. For the Tiwi male objects can be thin and small, while things of the female gender are big.  Today I was in pain after having an abscessed tooth removed - because of Covid 19 no dentists had been available and only today was I able to get treatment. What care and kindness from the dentist and his staff, eyes compassionate above masks. It is good to see one's own bony tooth out on the tray, and remember the larger cycles of time and renewal.   

Diana Wood Conroy, 'Moon and omphalos' 12.5 x 19 cm, 7 May 2020.

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.

Vista with small ruin, 5 May 2020

The land is constant, spreading out in the radiant day, dotted with birds. A few small houses catch the light, old coal miner's cottages set into bush above the highway. All these hills are full of coal, and the tunnels stretch miles underground. There is a mine less than a kilometre away, and sometimes the house quivers as big machinery shakes deep below. Above, the country used to be thick rainforest. A Dharrawal man once said  "My father told me you could walk to Sydney on the great boughs of fig trees", the forest was so dense. The little ruined temple to Athena comes from another time and place, part of European ancestry.  Athena, born from Zeus's head was a stern goddess of war, of breaking things down, but also she looked after the essential craft of weaving that ties things together. This strange time of the virus is like that, breaking down livelihoods and patterns of work and living, but perhaps there is a counterpoint, a re-envisioning of the arts of making. Metaphorically, we might again walk to Sydney on the great branches of fig trees.

Diana Wood Conroy' Vista with small ruin' watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21 cm, 5 May 2020.

Artemis with kelp holdfast, 4 May 2020

On a beach walk to Bulli headland the sand looked as if it were covered with spiders, which turned out to be the dried holdfasts from the forests of kelp torn from their anchor in the ocean. Walkers were carefully spaced far apart along the great sweep of the beach. Notices stuck in the sand said "Swimming not advisable" but black wetsuited surfers on boards were poised on mountainous curling waves. Artemis arrived in the watercolour drawn by the wildness of the fragment of seaweed. She was a goddess who hid in the deep recesses of forest or mountain; as "mistress of the beasts" she was kin to animals and vulnerable creatures.The neglect of children undermines a society and perhaps this is why she was given charge of childbirth and the care of children, especially young girls. They came to her sanctuary in Brauron in Attica and were called "little bears" while they were being trained to control their animal natures and become proper women. The Presbyterian school I went to would have approved.

Diana Wood Conroy 'Artemis with kelp holdfast', watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21 cm, 4 May 2020 

Shining day with bromeliad, 3 May 2020

The colour of the sky today was brilliant ultramarine, a blue glowing but dark like an ocean, an unfathomable void above the land. It was an intense relief to have some restrictions lifted, and the beloved two year old visited. I set out all the paints outside and she sat with immense concentration and painted each colour in separate patches, washing the brush to keep the next colour clean, making a rainbow panoply. After watching her I saw the brilliant bromeliad flower freshly, with its astonishing intricacy and curved petals. The development of the form of the theatre over several hundred years in early Greece and then moving to Rome is like watching a flower unfurl into the absolutely right shape for a place and time. The architecture of a theatre, composed of a stage floor or orchestra with seats raked around in a rising arc, once discovered, is as persistent as blossom. I hope the child will always live with such pure colour.

Diana Wood Conroy 'Shining day with bromeliad' watercolour on Arches paper,15 x 21 cm, 3 May 2020