Inside and outside, 22 May 2020, Day 60 of Covid 19 Isolation

Borders are in the news today, opening state borders, but also continuing boundaries between people. And the separation between being at home and being in the public sphere, or even inside and outside is still tense. I visited my office at the university today to get a book and the place was deserted of staff and students, empty corridors, vacant lawns and pathways, the wonderful teeming mass of people from all over the world, vanished. 'Take the bitter as the sweet' St Francis was supposed to have said. Think about the 'hesychasts' ('hesychia' is silence) the mystics of early Christian centuries devoted to the pursuit of quiet, getting beyond the chattering  mind to find some other immensity, a stillness. Some hermits lived in wild mountains in small houses eating forest greens and grinding chestnuts or a little wheat for bread, making baskets or brooms to earn a living. Many societies have lived as simply as this, including Australian foragers. The Cycladic stone bowl in the painting comes from an Early Bronze age tomb, from a small settlement on one of the many islands in the Aegean that made slowly pondered artefacts. There are many ways to live, not just the one I am used to.

Diana Wood Conroy 'Inside and outside', watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21 cm, 22 May 2020

Lilies on a rainy day, 21 May 2020

The lily symbolises purity in old European stories even though it's not much mentioned in the media today, which is full of economic uncertainties. The flowers have a delicate scent, and draw light towards them in an interior of rainy gloom. Today is the feast day of St Helen, the mother of Emperor Constantine, who famously had a vision of the cross at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, and became Christian. His saintly mother set out for Jerusalem to see what she could find, three hundred years after the Crucifixion. I think of her as an early archaeologist, because digging down into rubbish dumps around the foot of the hill of Golgotha she found (she was sure)  the three crosses, ascertaining Christ's cross through a miracle.  Pieces of the True Cross found their way to many holy places across Europe, including Cyprus. In Jerusalem I saw the place, now a church, where she  fed the workmen who built chapels and churches for her across the city. On the wall hung a great bronze vessel, as big as a copper, in which she cooked lentils.  St Helen is much venerated today in that underlayer of the faithful, a world invisible, like artists are, to the greater society. 

Diana Wood Conroy 'Lilies on a rainy day', watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21 cm, 21 May 2020

Table with sculpture of a baby's head, 20 May 2020

In a red dawn the bronze sculpture of a baby's head asks to be drawn. Made by Joseph Conroy it is a model of our son's head at four weeks old. It was perturbing to hear reports of the deaths of eleven mothers, and some children from domestic violence so far in the Covid 19 lockdown. The fragile child is the centre of existence, really, even though you won't find motherhood/babyhood widely represented in contemporary art. In early Australia many children used to wander away from unfenced houses and get lost in the bush. Living for years in a remote eucalyptus forest I used to hear at night the persistent crying of a baby among the pinpricks of crickets and the hoots of bookbook owls.

The earliest Greek myths have violent imagery of the Titan god Cronos swallowing all the children that his wife Rhea bore him, because his son was destined to be greater than he was. When Zeus was born, Rhea handed Cronos a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes to swallow, and hid the child. Once grown, Zeus gave Cronus an emetic so that he vomited up the stone and all his brothers and sisters who became the Olympian pantheon.  The stone became the navel stone at Delphie, adorned with wool. After this ancient hint of human sacrifice, Hellenistic imagery finds a place for the poignant individuality of even a sleeping baby, such as the one carved in marble in Paphos, a little Eros.  Two stories; the child as the enemy of the parent and the child as future strength - they are probably still with us.

Diana Wood Conroy 'Table with sculpture of a baby's head', watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21 cm, 20 May 2020.

Flowers with cockatoo, 19 May 2020

A cockatoo surveys the scene of a miscellany of native and introduced plants and things. Some venerable birds live to be 80 years old and are astute in organising their humans for food and company. When for some reason they don't appear in the morning I feel a pang of fear as if even they might succumb to changing climates. Little silver-eyes and pardalotes have gone somewhere else and no longer appear in the garden. Things are changing. Studying birds and their patterns of flight  (oionismos) was said to give  prophetic insights in ancient Cyprus. The goddess Hera is always associated with the peacock, bird of immortality, while Aphrodite's bird is the sparrow or sometimes the dove found everywhere like love. And cockatoo feathers are powerful in northern Australia in warding off spirits. There's a lot to learn about local love magic.

Diana Wood Conroy, 'Flowers with cockatoo'watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21 cm,19 May 2020 

Table with clouds, 18 May 2020

The sky today was  teeming with clouds rushing from one horizon to the other, rapidly changing shape, concealing then revealing patches of azure emptiness. The parks are open again so that you can push children on swings higher and higher so they imagine they are superheroes among the clouds looking down on earth, visiting unknown planets and distant galaxies. On the walls in Egyptian tombs  there are paintings of tables heaped with offerings of food in great dishes. The ceilings are often painted with  a pattern of stars, the divine stars who oversee the fate of humans - similarly in Roman tombs in Cyprus, wall paintings of garlands and vessels are surmounted by a star painted canopy on the ceiling. Perhaps the happiness at seeing tables laden with dishes and plates of food in re-opened if scantily occupied restaurants has a faint resonance with ancient instincts.

Diana Wood Conroy, 'Table with clouds', watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21 cm, 18 May 2020