Creativity and Apple Pie

Like his father, our Son and Heir likes to bicycle around the countryside, and during the autumn he never returns without panniers full of wild apples, picked from abandoned fruit trees.

 Every afternoon found a new pile of fruit product piled somewhere on my kitchen counters; when I mentioned that the apples were getting in my way, the Heir moved them from one counter to the next, but then filled up the released space with a newly discovered variety from yet another forsaken tree.

I had apples on top of the microwave, behind the toaster, in the breadbox, and tumbling out of the refrigerator; when kitchen counter space became scarce the laundry room was the new landing page for these refugee fruits.

Yep, I could make applesauce; I'm sure that's a great suggestion, but I really hate canning. I also hate wasting good food — especially unsprayed, organic food — so I did adjust our meal plan to incorporate apples in all forms, for all meals. You can make a really quick healthy apple concoction on the stove with water, a little sugar, cinnamon, lemon juice, butter, and — what else — apples, and I shortly found that this was a fast, cheap, easy breakfast option. We ate it day after day, and the pile of apples grew noticeably smaller (it helped that the weather grew colder and there were no more afternoon harvest sessions).

So what do apples have to do with painting, aside from being a still life painting subject?

Just this: as you work around a potentially overwhelming situation or circumstance — in this case, it was apples everywhere; in your case, it could be trying to create oil paintings on the side while working a day job, or making do with limited financial resources to purchase painting materials, or not having the art studio of your dreams (who does?). You get pretty creative with what you have, and the solution you find to your problem changes how you do everything else.