The Apple Tree

The Apple Tree

This is my oil painting of The Apple Tree. It was painted a couple of years ago when I was going through a particularly hard winter and was drawing on the last reserves of inner strength I had left, unsure of weather I would be able to keep going as an unknown artist. In this sense the blackbirds are kind of symbolic of my girlfriend and myself, eeking out the last bit of sustenance from a previous harvest.
The tree was in a garden of a house we were renting at the time. We had noticed that it was not producing very many apples and wondered if it needed a good prune. However I was a bit nervous about taking a saw to it's branches. A tree is after all a lifeform just like us and I wondered if it could feel pain, and thus resent having it's limbs trimmed with a blade. (I think I had been watching Lord of the Rings quite a bit and had the whole Treebeard and the Ents "Shepherd of the Forest" type of thing fresh in my mind) Anyway, one night, I thought it would be a good idea to photograph the tree while asking it to show me a sign that it was happy for me to selectively saw some branches off.

Millions of light orbs swirling around the tree

I was treated to a real show of light orbs that came swirling around the tree to give me the thumbs up. I like to think that these were magical nature spirits or faeries that sometimes can muster enough energy to show themselves in the visible spectrum or to be recorded on sensitive cell of a digital camera. And no it was not raining that night.

The Artist in the tree, saw in hand

So the next morning I went ahead and began carefully pruning the old tree, confident that I was not inflicting any pain on him, and thinking that the nature spirits and old Treebeard would be happy that I was doing the job with enough respect and sensitivity to the Kindom of Nature.

A small songbird in the Apple Tree

The next Spring I was delighted to see an abundance of apple blossom on the branches and we had a bumper crop of apples to boot. I even spotted this charming bird with his head thrown back chirping a sweet song to the heavens from the branches of the apple tree. I rushed to get my camera and was rewarded with this great shot which for me signifies the joy felt when the blossom of Spring bursts out in the warmth of the sun after a harsh and lifeless Winter.