Les Trois Soeurs et les trois frères

Les Trois Soeurs par Claude St-Jacques

The centre of the painting is open and empty, a distant blue horizon. On the left, symmetrical trees dot a rich grain field. To the right, the three faceless women, formal as widows, gaze solemnly out of the picture. I love the mystery of these three figures, impassive but daring the viewer to project some meaning on to them.

This picture, Les Trois Soeurs by Claude St-Jacques, hangs in the living room of my Montreal home. On this Autumn evening my three young sons are sleeping softly, loose-limbed and tousled. These women remind me that there's another side to my boys, a sensitive mysterious feminine side (shh - don't tell them!); it's often hidden but it's always there behind their wide eyes. And that far blue horizon is their future, stretched out under a big sky, hopeful, leading to, well, who knows where?

The figures are forever mysterious: just when I think I understand them their expression changes, facelessly. Sometimes I think I know my young sons too; other times less so. And occasionally on their faces I believe I see an expression that says they might know me better than I know them.

Not a cover but a new layer

As I wrote in my last post, Martha Wainwright's recordings of the Piaf songs add new layers to originals that are very much still present. The spirit of Piaf is there, as she says in the video.

There's a rich tradition of this sort of layering in the visual arts of course as I was reminded when I saw some works by the photographer Tom Hunter. In his work "Woman reading a possession order" he twists and builds on Vermeer's famous "A girl reading at an open window". The interior of a 17th century middle-class Dutch home has become a London squat in the 1990's, the fruit a baby, the love letter an eviction order. Beautiful, poignant, thought-provoking. See all the images in his collection Persons Unknown.