Symbols

A pair of unrepentant threes today, just because I can.

The first is a revisit to an old favourite, Rickards' hardware shop in Ludlow, Shropshire. Symbolism is a tradition in paintings from the Renaissance period, a feature picked up by the Pre-Raphaelites in the Victorian era. For example, depicting a plane tree symbolised charity, the snail, laziness and smoke indicated the shortness of life. While glass suggests the notion of purity, the main symbolic focus in my image is to do with numbers.

Three bottle-carriers strung out on three hooks in a geometric progression of two, four and six sections. Three has an obvious Christian significance in the Trinity and is also seen as a number of completeness; expressing a beginning, a middle and an end. Perhaps that's what so appealing about threes in visual terms. Then throw in its importance in fairy tales - when do you ever get four wishes? or six?

I'll brush aside two, four and six and their sum, twelve (apostles, anyone?) because it would take me all night and I'm really not that committed to this line of enquiry - sorry. But I will not ignore the faintly lurking seven at the bottom of the glass pane. It is regarded as the second most important number after, you guessed it, three. It gives us, in western civilisation, such groups as the seven ages of man, seven virtues, seven deadly sins and the seven sacraments of the Christian Church. A bit of a cracker, seven and combined with another just the same, as seventy seven, the address on Sunset Strip that will be memorable to all those who watched television in the early 1960s.

It may appear that my interest in religion runs somewhat contrary to my avowed stance with regards to belief in a god. All I can say is that it fascinates me. I was dragged to church as a child, on one occasion wearing a brown corduroy cap, a seminal moment in the destruction of one's belief system, and had formulated a view on the rationality of the whole business by the time I was thirteen. Now, having discarded it for my own purposes, religion is something I can embrace as a dispassionate observer and, to that end, I studied it as part of my degree course in European Humanities. It intrigues me and as long as people keep it to themselves and don't try to inflict their beliefs on others, nor practise their beliefs in a way that impinges on the lives of others, then I'm fine with it.

Now, which direction is Cloud Cuckoo Land?

And so to another three, a lovely faded green door, distressed and in want of TLC, and a trio of letter boxes, ripe for letters from loved ones or bills from the accursed.