Wild Apples & Creativity

Wild Apples

    

Are they though? Wild apples, I believe, grow outside an orchard or in somebody's yard. Along the roadside you can see shrubs that you know must have been planted by a house, but there is no house. The same is true of apple trees in a group. Then there's the issue of wildlife carrying the apple seeds into the woods by various means.

    One morning on a slow walk the sunlight was catching a bunch of wild apples just right to make their rotting shapes look lovely, almost ripe again. I took a photograph to paint from. The canvas has been hanging around. The photo hasn't. There are folders labeled, ToPaint, that I use. Once in a while though, a picture becomes lost. Like the apples, it has gone wild.

    Autumn is a season of reflection, I feel, more than the other three are. We harvest our knowledge, our memories, our expectations of where we have been and where we are going. 

    I'm thinking that way because I've been painting again, regularly on a few canvases at a time, old as well as new images. Depression isn't selective. It mows down much of what we enjoy doing in life. Being an artist that doesn't paint is not comfortable for me. The irony is that when I am in a severely deep episode, art is where I retreat from the pain. This time, however, it is the resolve to be Artist, not pain that brings me to pick up a brush.

    I feel that there are times in life when we don't need to figure out why. It is better, when it happens, to just enjoy our creative selves.