Crab Apples

A friend pruned her crabapple tree and offered me glorious armfuls of the cut branches to paint. The scale was important to me here, because the golden red fruits are small and there so many of them amongst the blue /green, almond -shaped leaves ,so the painting became more about the mass of the whole thing and the rhythm of the branches and the play of light on the whole bundle , whilst still celebrating the detail of particular fruits.I remember going to a lecture about the Gestalt theories of macrocosm and microcosm – I think most students would have been able to grasp the principle more vividly if they had been given these crabapples to paint!