Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Almost Accidental Still Life - Mountains Trip

This sort of happened by accident - I just moved the candles and turned the bowl to catch the light from a different angle. Apples in the bowl were bought from a "mix your own" stall at a local farmer's market in Boone, NC. The apples on the table were scrumped - some of the most delicious were scrumped after climbing a barbed wire fence. The old saying is true.

And there is no better way to eat them than to all be walking along an old carriage road, eating pieces in turn, cut and peeled with a pocket knife. This is now a family tradition, and while one blade of my two-bladed knife is primarily used for carving walking sticks - the other is reserved for apples.


P.S. - Sunday I redid my gallery website, simplifying so it's easier to maintain and easier to tour. I added the latest paintings that have been posted here, and also a "Small Works" page for the little paintings. I'll be doing more of those - they were fun and I might even be able to do them on lunch break at work.

5 comments:

L'Adelaide said...

my favorite way to eat an apple too, although I don't know what scrumped is....if you mean pirated from some poor farmer's tree, well, being a farmer, I am NOT in favor but otherwise, totally in agreement....now I am off to see your new gallery website! :)

Steve Emery said...

Linda - Actually that IS what scrumped means (stolen) - but we never dream of taking apples from anything but neglected wild trees, on abandoned farms in National Parks, or from stray trees in roadsides and thickets. We have too much respect for the hard work and often poor rewards of the American farmer, especially the family farmer. But in the Blue Ridge forgotten apple trees are all over, if you know how to see them. Sometimes they have only a half dozen apples, so they're hard to spot unless you know the fruit tree's unique body language. And those apples are often quite different than domesticated fare. Quite organic by now, and the neglect, while not good for yields, seems to be excellent for quality.

Distributorcap said...

can you core a apple

(had to throw my honeymooners lines in there)

Anonymous said...

I love the composition of the photo.

Anonymous said...

scrumped, huh? What a great word. Something like gleeped (from the 60s) - but that wasn't really stealing...it was just changing ownership because of neglect (I think the legal time limit was 3 minutes of neglect before it could be a legal gleep).