Encounter with an Old Apple Tree (oil on canvas, 2010)

I finished this last week, based on a series of pastel drawings that I did during late May and early June. I went back to this location a couple of weeks ago with a smaller canvas and the grass and weeds were so high that would have needed a machete to get anywhere near this tree. The neighborhood where I grew up in central Massachusetts abutted some land that had at one time been an apple orchard and I used to love finding old trees like this in overgrown fields and climbing up into them with my friends.