Sisters - Oil on Board

The two sisters in the picture are my daughters, Amy and Alice. The eldest, Amy, was about to leave home. One sunny morning I found them practicing the flute and the bass recorder together, and aware that these were the last precious days of uninterrupted family life, decided to paint their portraits. I had been turning over the thought of such a painting for some time, and when I saw in the girls' postures the same concentration and poise that I remembered from Vermeer's painting of the young woman weighing pearls, the two images came together with a sort of "eureka" delight.
The resulting picture is a study of young womanhood placed in a historical context. It is a celebration of family life and of creation. If the "Woman Weighing Pearls" in Vermeer's painting on the wall behind Amy and Alice is an idealisation of womankind, I would be happy for her to be read as a tribute to the girls' mother - my wife, Mary.
The Vermeer picture reminds us that the past and the present have much in common. For me this painting of a thoughtful woman weighing pearls is an entrancing essay on the perennial theme of right thinking. Scales exist to balance matters and so to discover exact values. Amy, the eldest, was about to study Natural Sciences at Trinity College Cambridge, and my thoughts at that time were very much on the disciplines of science and the nature of scientific thought. Both sisters love literature, and after a childhood with C.S. Lewis in Narnia and on Prince Edward Island with LM Montgomery, they graduated with a passion to the balance, precision, and purifying irony of Jane Austen. They have always been able to share their imaginative lives with each other. But both girls focused on the physical world for their degrees, and Alice followed Amy to Pembroke College Cambridge, also to study Natural Sciences.
I believe that beautiful art, as much as good literature and truthful science has its foundation in the good of right reason. Either goodness, beauty and truth enter the understanding of mankind from an absolute source beyond the material world - as also moral sensitivity and reason itself which permeates and upholds them all, or they are epiphenomena of unthinking molecular activity. If the latter, then we would live in a value-free universe. Everything that exists would simply be the endless and mindless "morphing" of matter - a meaningless jiggling of atoms , including of course, all theories about the jiggling of atoms.
In practice no-one lives consistently according to such a non-ethic. The claim of Reasoning to be valid is accepted even by people who try to prove that it is conditioned by natural forces. (If you "prove" there are no proofs but only a chain of cause and effect, you destroy your own reasoning). So, since we all have to make choices, and since we all choose somewhere in our lives to honour others with our own service of goodness and beauty and truth for their sakes, this picture is a homage to family relationships and to a love which is common to us all.
As for other symbols or suggestions that the painting may contain, I leave their discovery to the viewers' imagination, but for those who are interested, further clues to my own line of thought can be found in an article on the "Woman Weighing Pearls" .

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