Wednesday
Apr222020

Illawarra coast with ruined temple, 22 April 2020

Today, another encounter with the real world when I visited a medical centre. On the sunny path at the gateway lay a young woman collapsed in a faint after having an injection. The prone figure with two nurses bending over her, one supporting her with her arm, was like an ancient relief carving. Remembering my time in Athens as a student, I thought of how I had lived looking every day at the Acropolis looming over the city in all times and seasons, always turning my eyes to the ruined Parthenon with its uncanny proportions. Students then were allowed to visit it at the full moon, with no other lighting.

Now  a lifetime later, in a place unimagined to the builders of the Parthenon, those impressions linger. Le Corbusier the eminent modern architect put it forcefully. ‘It is the Acropolis made a rebel of me. One clear image will stand in my mind forever: the Parthenon. Stark, stripped, economical, violent; a clamorous outcry against a landscape of grace and terror. All strength and purity.’ The antithesis really to the much older Australian ethos, so it is as well to put the tiny simulacrum of the Parthenon in the scope of this shimmering country. 

 


Diana Wood Conroy 'Illawarra coast with ruined temple' watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21 cm, 22 April 2020

Tuesday
Apr212020

Flowers with an incense burner, 21 April 2020.

Today I left the house for the first time in weeks, to get a flu injection. It was quite exciting to go out, and even to consider what to wear. A clinic had been set up in the back garden of the surgery with chairs placed two metres apart as if for a performance.  I found a former colleague there, a biological scientist and inventor, who said "I was about to travel when the lock down happened, on leave for the first time in years, and at first I was furious, but now I just ferociously garden."

The circular many-petalled flower is the basis of the rosette, a foundation motif for pattern, especially in ancient vase-painting and mosaics. Rosettes cluster to form larger patterns in optical waves, with shimmering grids, chequers and scale or feather patterns in a graduated measure. Some scholars suggest that in times of uncertain and fluctuating security Roman societies found a particular pleasure in these optical patterns.  It follows that the impulse to be with flowers is what people have always done. And venerate them with a bit of incense.


Diana Wood Conroy "Flowers with an incense burner' watercolour on Arches paper 15 x 21 cm, 21 April 2020

Monday
Apr202020

Coastal forest with bowls and a small theatre, 20 April, 2020

The architecture of ancient Greek and Roman theatres has preoccupied me for decades, working with an excavation team in Cyprus. 'Theatron' in Greek means 'a place for seeing', a place where the people of a town could congregate to cycles of plays with exagerrated versions of people they knew in everyday life such as the  lustful old man, the young woman sometimes of dubious morality,  the young man, fool in love, and the old woman as harridan.  Here in the Illawarra, the stage is set, but with trees as the main protagonists, trees filling the cavea or auditorium of the hills, waiting for action in the curved orchestra, the sea.  When you live on an island, change comes from the sea. The environment itself (or herself)is now the main character in the ongoing drama.


Diana Wood Conroy, 'Coastal forests with bowls and a small theatre' Watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21 cm, 20 April, 2020.

 

Sunday
Apr192020

Spindle whorl with bay leaves 19 April 2020

The Illawarra is Dharawal country, with Wodi Wodi, and Yuin people to the south. The days of the virus bring quiet, so that the roar of traffic in the distance is stilled and you can begin to discern a shimmer of the other way of being in the country before the the settlers changed everything. There are still Dharrawal words to learn like wugan, crow. Below, I have painted a tiny flock of crows flying over the land. And all these birds, still seen frequently have Dharrawal names - Fairy wren is muruduwin, black cockatoo is garadi, hawk is bunda, king parrot is guma, sulphur-crested cockatoo is garrawi, tawny frogmouth is binit, and wonga pigeon is wunga wunga, so that we still use the original  name for at least one bird. Perhaps by giving them their ancient names we can enrich the birds' perception of the newer mixed people and encourage the continuous inhabiting of this place by the essential creatures who give it a voice.

The spindle whorl is a nearly extinct artefact too, speaking of twisting movements once common by the hand that might still be a thing to learn again.

Diana Wood Conroy Spindle whorl with bay leaves, watercolour on Arches pape,r 15 x 21 cm, April 19, 2020

Saturday
Apr182020

Pattern of leaves, 18 April, 2020

There are leaves drifting everywhere, each one with its own intricate architecture. These are from the incense plant, deeply scented. The cutting was given to me by a friend, a poet, and it took root happily and is now a small tree.  Stories emerge in the days of isolation which show a changed world out there. I heard of an older woman living alone in her London flat. The neighbours noticed that the food left at her door had not been brought into the house, so the police were called and broke down the door to find her unconscious on the floor infected with Covid 19. After two weeks in hospital she has recovered, but with no memory of what happened.

Another woman, suspended from work, has taken to gardening with complete absorption. I think the structure of leaves is akin to the architecture of the body and while gardening, memory and thinking stop for awhile. The garden kindly takes me into itself, and I can forget. 

Diana Wood Conroy, 'Pattern of Leaves', watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21 cm, 18 April 2020