Flowers on a grey day, 27 April 2020

A child wails next door on the still day, the sky like a corrugated roof.  Like blossoms suddenly opening, when a new child arrives in the family there is rapturous delight. But today an indefinable malaise descends so that when I see the children waving at me on my phone, but breaking up into pixels on the screen, I have a stab of fear as if this foreshadows a fractured future. But the children themselves laugh and  overcome any worries by showing me paintings with great slabs of colour, a flame of red, a wall of yellow, a dome of blue on big sheets of paper. It's a wonder for me too to take a brush to wet paper so that it flairs with colours like viridian, alizarin, vermilion or ultramarine. The mark of the hand is as mysterious as alchemy.

Diana Wood Conroy 'Flowers on a grey day', watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21 cm, 27 April 2020.

Curtain with winged horse, 26 April 2020

A neigbour down the street has made a fairy garden of brilliant rockery flowers clustering around figurines of animals, dwarves and elves, lights, chairs, strange rocks, and a wheelbarrow full of succulents.  I put out spare plants from the garden by the edge of the road, and she collects them. The printed curtain was made in the 1950s and has riotous vegetation with small monsters in roundels. When the morning sun shines through, it makes the bedroom a magical place.

The next stage of a disaster in the ancient Mediterranean, after war, earthquake  or plague had ravaged a place, was lack of work and then famine. In Greece on the island of Andros as a girl, there would be trips to the interior of the island to stone villages perched on rocky slopes. Out of fifty houses, sometimes only two would be inhabited after the disaster of the World War 11 and a bitter civil war. Visiting such a village on an inaccessible track, an old man once called out to us "Stop, drink a glass of water with me. I am all alone, everyone has died or emigrated." Built into the wall of his house was an ancient stone carved with a cherub, veil flying - as if only this vital image had kept him company and still alive.   

Diana Wood Conroy 'Curtain with a winged horse', Watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21 cm, 26 April 2020

Dawn, 25 April 2020

Pinpoints of light in the suburbs at dawn, a kookaburra, and when the Last Post sounds spectrally on the radio, a chicken starts crowing, a flight of parrots drops from the gum. The family next door are huddled on their balcony too, looking over towards the sea in the cold wind. The children and I blow kisses. A little palmette on the table matches the colour of the rising sun. Yesterday the university announced devastating financial loss   from the Covid 19. Universities have been forced through continual cuts in Government funding to use International students as a main resource. Such wonderful International students I have taught there: sometimes Mandarin was the most common language in the postgraduate studio. They revered learning and their professors and studied with huge determination to grasp and succeed in a different culture and language.

Doubly sad, thinking of my father in World War II for six years, and then him coming home to work in building a wide-ranging university system under Robert Menzies in the 1950s. Education, the heartwarming 'universitas' of teachers and students researching together in courageous scholarship has illuminated my life. 'Search' in old definitions is not only to scrutinise knowledge, but to examine one’s own heart and thinking, and even to probe a wound.

Diana Wood Conroy,' Dawn', watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21 cm, 25 April 2020.

Table with a feather, 24 April 2020

Luminous days, despite looming economic difficulties. In this part of the world furniture and anything no longer wanted is put on the grassy verge  beside the road. We put  a book box out there with old classics like Leaves of Grass, Australian Short Stories, Raymond Chandler, even the Wife of Bath. At the other end of the long street, down the hill, someone had put an office chair out. Behold, by the end of the day the chair had mysteriously moved all the way up the road to perch beside the books, for peaceful browsing.

Finding a perfect feather s is considered a sign by First Nations people. 'When you need a feather, it appears' said Ben, a Crow man at an Indigenous  Conference I once attended in Upper NY State in the Iroquois Confederacy. I was not allowed to attend the gatherings, but looked after two Yolngu women from Arnhemland. Ben wanted to give us a Crow blessing, and got out a little leather pouch with dried sweet herbs, to light and make the smoke. But he needed a feather to fan the small smouldering flame. And suddenly, there was a feather near by, a crow feather of course. A sign of concordance, and recognition. 'The god whose oracle is at Delphi neither reveals nor conceals, but gives a sign,' said Heraclitos.

Diana Wood Conroy, 'Table with a feather', watercolour on Arches paper 15 x 21 cm, 24 April 2020

Night sky with figure, 23 April, 2020

Last night , or very early in the morning there was a meteor shower in the north eastern sky, but because of urban light I couldn't see it. But I could see the Milky Way, arching over, scattered with stars. The figure from Pompei is turning its back, terrified I think by the immensity of what's out there. It's now a month since self-isolation started, and after the initial grasping of the challenge I sense a fearfulness that normal interactions will never return. My grandchildren are missing friends and new things happening at school. Others see partners breaking away. You can't visit a market, go to an exhibition or performance in real time and space, or lie on a beach. It is terrible for artists, as opportunities drop away. 

So look to the Milky Way within. Here is Alexis Wright from her Swan Book, ‘Imagination is a marvellous thing. It’s free. It’s wild. It comes from nowhere. It comes from practice. Hold on to it. Instead of being defeated by this enormous load, you can lighten the weight by constructing another way of looking at things.... Having learnt how to escape the reality about this place, I have created illusionary ancient homelands to encroach on and destroy the wide-open vista of the virus’s real-estate.'  

Diana Wood Conroy,' Night sky with figure', watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21 cm, 23 April, 2020.