The 70 Days of Covid 19 from Day 70 1June backwards to Day 1, March 24 2020. Sponge from the beach, Day 70, 1 June 2020

Everything is opening up, with a semblance of normality.  A walk on the radiant beach was sprinkled with families. A tiny boy toddled along, his feet in the crinkly waves, laughing and laughing in pure happiness at being there. The interlaced branches of the sponge found on the sand had been thrown up by rough seas.  I think Covid 19 has been a rough sea, and will change everyone in all kinds of ways, such as the unthinking ease of travel and being in crowded places. The universities will change irreversibly. 

I have kept this daily Covid 19 journal for 70 days, since March 24th and will stop now as restrictions lift. I've become aware, as Julia Baird has said, that in difficult times you draw on what you have learnt and felt, all the gifts of family, education, friendship and love. The 'nous' in Greek means the heartfelt mind, or a thinking heart and this can be a bulwark, a fortress against attacks from anxious uncertainty. Keeping the seventy day rhythm of posting the daily watercolour has allowed me to view the underlying necessity of what I have done over fifty years of being an artist. The subterranean drive to make art over decades has become visible in weeks of unstructured time. The next thing is to document the archive of my tapestries and other works, in ardent thanks to all the institutions and people who have supported me since my first Australia Council grant in 1975.

It was wonderful that people have read this journal and I was vastly encouraged by warm appreciation.

Diana Wood Conroy ,'Sponge from the beach', watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21 cm, 1 June 2020

Mountain weather 31 May 2020

It's a small mountain set in the escarpment, but like all singular landforms it seems to have a geological permanence about it. It's good to consider in the fearful Covid era. Mountains are in a way timeless, and yet science measures their formation chronologically in millions of years. It seems that among the Dharrawal people who lived here before Europeans, chronological time (chronos) was not significant in terms of counting years, weeks, days and hours. What was important was the present moment (kaipos) of finding food, and preparing for funeral or initiation rituals in which ancestral time was simultaneously in the present.   Plato thought leadership was the ability to know the “kairos” the right moment or opportunity, and to weave recognition of this right moment in the judgements of citizens. The intense blue of the mountain is a moment of rightness and makes me forget the relentless clock.

Diana Wood Conroy 'Mountain weather',watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21 cm, 31 May 2020.

Day 68 of the Covid crisis, 30 May 2020

The same subject on a different day, with different light. I heard satin bower birds quietly wheezing in the garden and they crept into the painting. Like every woman in my family I pick flowers for rooms of the house to freshen the atmosphere and lighten the stresses of the day. In the second century flowers were placed in the corners  where the house gods, the Lares, attended to the smooth running of domestic affairs. There's evidence that walls with frescoes of the stories of gods and heroes had hooks to hang garlands, perhaps to Fortuna, if things were getting difficult. In the middle of desperate times in France in the Second World War, Henri Matisse painted gloriously abundant, jewel-like still lifes, and portraits of beautiful women. He said he wanted to offer comfort.  The world news on the Virus gets worse, and America is aflame. It pierces the heart. A few flowers as an offering.

 Diana Wood Conroy 'Day 68 of the Covid Crisis' watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21 cm, 30 May, 2020.

Nasturtiums with Corinthian pot, 29 May 2020

The nasturtiums are  popping up with green circular leaves and little explosions of colour all over the garden, an invasive plant really, but with associations from childhood. I have drawings of nasturtiums that my grandmother made at Glasgow Art School in the early 1900s. I was feeling shattered by the blowing up of very ancient sacred sites in WA by the mining company Rio Tinto, an inexcusable  destruction, such as one might expect from the Taliban. And then I picked the brilliant flowers.  On the tiny replica of a Corinthian perfume vessel the two weavers are standing next to a vertical loom. Weaving is an act of building horizontal weft through vertical warp, a way of binding together diverse threads to make a fabric, almost an act of repair. To explode something is quick, but to learn to make thread and weave cloth may take ten thousand hours.

Diana Wood Conroy, 'Nasturtiums with Corinthian pot' watercolour and pastel on grey paper, 15 x 21cm 29 May 2020

On the road to Wingello, 28 May 2020

The tangly intricate bush on the road to the Southern Highlands hasn't changed, except there is a new koala fence to stop animals getting on to the road. Burnt areas are sprouting bunches of leaves like those used in a smoking ceremony. Some of the houses ruined in the fires have been cleared, leaving just a brick chimney, still with an Aga stove intact, still surrounded by tall dead pine trees. In a sunny moment we stopped the car at a winery and the taste of the first coffee outside the house since late February, was delicious. The feeling of the dense trees reminded me of visiting graves on the Tiwi Islands, with an old friend who cried out to all the spirits as we approached deeper into the bush where people I had known well were buried. He yodelled in a high pure voice and called 'don't worry old ones, it's only me with a friend, we won't trouble you'. it's easy to imagine that such presences still inhabit those immense forested valleys and canyons. 

Diana Wood Conroy 'On the road to Wingello', watercolour and crayon on pastel paper, 15 x 21 cm, 28 May 2020